Not Just for Cowboys Anymore: Looking into Black Hat and White Hat SEO
1) White Hat SEO is the usage of SEO strategies, techniques and tactics that hone in on a human audience, rather than search engines. They also completely follow the policies and rules of search engines. Some techniques are:
Quality Content: Ensure your content is accurate and will best service your audience, as search engines will pull up the options that it believes will best serve the end user.
Titles and Meta Data: Titles reflect what the content is about, so it is important to make sure you are still focusing on this aspect, making it as accurate as possible.
Use Semantic Mark Ups/Separate Content from Presentation: It is crucial to make sure your headings are as accurate as possible, as search engines place the most weight on that area of your data. CONTENT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT (make sure its lean).
Effective Keyword Usage: Think in the shoes of your target audience, multiword phrases help the most. In addition, applying this concept, you will be targeting people who are actually interested in the content you are offering.
Quality Inbound Links: Good links are links from other web pages that are regarded highly by the search engines and are contextually relevant to the content of your page. Bad links are links from web pages that aren’t regarded highly or potentially banned by search engines and have no relevance to the content of your page.
**For more information please follow this link: http://www.pushon.co.uk/articles/top-5-white-hat-and-black-hat-search-optimisation-techniques/**
2) Black hat SEO's are the use of aggressive SEO strategies, techniques and tactics that focus only on search engines and not a human audience, and usually does not obey search engines rules.
Techniques include:
Hidden Content: Content that is not visible to the end user of the site, but the content is stuffed with key words
Doorway or Gateway Pages: pages specifically designed for the search engine and have no impact on the end user, which are fake pages stuffed with content, but contain 1 to 2 highly optimized keywords that will link to a landing page. End users will never see this page because direction on the search engine takes you directly to the landing page.
Link Farming: Also known as free for all pages,just list links to pages that are irrelevant. Your site can be banned from that search engine. THIS IS SUPER RISKY.
**For more information please follow this link: http://www.pushon.co.uk/articles/top-5-white-hat-and-black-hat-search-optimisation-techniques/**
3) White Hat SEO example is Brick Marketing Firm:
http://www.brickmarketing.com/white-hat-link-building
Business is mainly across United States and Canada
They focus upon the SEO tactics of link building and link earning
They believe through this use, it develops a product and brand quality image
Their motto, "Links are the bread and butter of SEO. As a white hat link building firm, Brick Marketing is proud to offer full service white hat link building services for our clients. Our SEO white hat link building process will help your site develop a diverse link portfolio, increase your online brand presence, establish a trust factor with the search engines, drive targeted traffic to your site and more"
Black Hat SEO example is Overstock.com
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2049969/Overstock.com-Lands-in-Googles-Penalty-Box-Over-Links-for-Discounts-Deal
Had great rankings and people decided to look into these rankings (red flag)
Found to be doing links for discount deals, which according to Google violates their policy and renders under black hat seo
The company encouraged that the websites of colleges and universities to post links to Overstock pages so that students and faculty could receive discounts on the shopping site
Google took action after a competitor complained
Overstock has now dropped to the 5th or 6th page since this occurred
Will competitors begin to be the best police for Google with these Black Hat situations?
While Google, felt it was wrong and should be penalized, many others believed it was genius marketing