Whether your business is maintaining SEO in-house or outsourcing to an SEO provider, it's important to understand how your business website marketing is being handled. Common SEO techniques include "White Hat", "Black Hat" and "Gray Hat" methods of gaining a competitive edge and a higher page rank in the search results.
White Hat SEO Methods.
White Hat SEO relies on a well designed website with carefully chosen keywords and a plan to steadily gain views over the long term by quality of content, as well as the quality of external websites linking directly to it. Quality SEO service providers keep within the guidelines issued by search engines and exclude deceptive practices by keeping the content of their pages relevant to any chosen keywords, key phrases, meta tags and page titles. Since search engines ignore pages that are over stuffed with keywords, the sparing use and precise choice of them is an art form.
Black Hat SEO Methods.
Black Hat SEO service providers, commonly known as Black Hatters, are mainly concerned with a fast spike in customer traffic, knowing that the search engines will eventually catch up with them. Techniques include anything that the search engines feel is not fair game to improve page rankings. Black Hat SEO service providers know their activities may lead to a clients site getting banned by search engines and may not disclose their methods to unsuspecting customers. Clients find out the true facts when page views drop from amongst the top sites viewed to complete obscurity. Some common examples of these deceptive methods are hiding keywords and content from visitors' view, while optimizing the hidden content for the tools that search engines use to gather information. Often times current topics and articles are secretly embedded in the site, producing completely irrelevant search results.
Gray Hat SEO Methods.
Gray Hat SEO is a little harder to define, as some common methods could be said to belong to either of the aforementioned categories. This typically involves methods that are frowned upon by search engines such as buying links, second page poaching and deceptively creative use of content. A common example is the inclusion of customer reviews or testimonials that are actually cleverly worded adverts. When carefully scrutinized, the same keywords found in the main text will also be seen throughout falsified reviews. Buying and trading external links is another common Gray Hat SEO technique that can and will get your website banned from the search results.
Quality search engine optimization is a long term investment. Business owners should be wary of SEO service providers that guarantee high rankings overnight. Question their methods, or you may find your company website banned from the search engines. Once it's flagged due to deceptive practices, there is no chance of recovering.
No comments:
Post a Comment