White hat black hat SEO tactics

June 14, 2011

In the world of online marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is king. It offers website owners low cost marketing through search engine results, with little or no cost. Before you hire a company to provide SEO services, it’s important to know which services are good and which will get you banned from top search engines.

Black Hat SEO Tactics

As the term Black Hat implies, there are good ways to build your website traffic and bad ways to get Google’s attention, and these tactics make use of tricks to generate visitors to your website. Here are some common methods used by SEO firms that are considered sneaky and will get you banned from Google:

Keyword Stuffing is used commonly to try to drive traffic up by placing the same keywords over and over on a page, often in small text or in hidden layers.
Hidden Text on a page is used for keyword stuffing and to bury links so they appear for Google but not for the average visitor. This is a great way to get banned from Google and it’s how BMW was removed.
Cloaking is used to present different information to the search engines than a human visitor and usually involves scripts that are designed to detect various search engine bots which will show content based on the type of client connecting.
Doorway pages are used to try to build traffic for specific keywords on a website and are often generated in bulk to stuff keywords through the methods above.
Redirection pages can be used for legitimate purposes (such as when I remove a piece of content and redirect to a new page), or they can be used to push visitors to spam pages.
Duplicate websites are designed to push the same or similar content with the intention of overpowering search engine results. This is also known as content scraping which involves picking up content from one website (often via RSS feeds) to display on other websites automatically.
Link farms are often used by SEO companies to generate links to websites in an attempt to affect the Google algorithm.

Does working with a Black Hat SEO firm or using their method really hurt your business? Matt Cutts, the guru of Google (actually he works for Google and lectures extensively on SEO techniques), thinks so. In fact, in the video below he talks about major newspapers and international automakers that have been stripped from the Google database for breaking the rules.

White Hat SEO Tactics

In a single word, White Hat SEO is about content. It’s what Google is designed to index and it’s how they determine who should be on top of the list. Essentially, White Hat SEO (the good guys) is about developing the content of your website in such a way that Google is able to read it, discover the proper content and index that content from your website. In order to do this, your website needs to have a few things:

Properly formatted pages using HTML standards as developed by and approved by the W3C. This is because Google is a robot; it reads data in a common format and indexes based on that format.
Properly tagged pages using the correct HTML such as title tags, headers, paragraphs and markup tags including the strong and em options to highlight certain words or phrases.
Optimized filenames help Google understand content by reading the URL to a page. This page, for example, is white-hat-black-hat-seo-tactics. That helps Google know what the content is about. Do the same for images, downloads etc.
Great titles that will help search engines understand your content with proper labels.
Accessibility matters because robots can’t see images and Google is nothing more than an exceptionally gifted computer program. Help Google index your images and improve page content by including ALT tags in your images and naming them properly.

Further Reading

White hat SEO for Bloggers
White Hat vs. Black Hat SEO
Few Common White Hat SEO Techniques
Website Traffic Stories
Choose a white hat SEO company
Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO: What’s the Difference?