The Many Color SEO Hats - Search Engines - SE Optimization

How many websites are ranking at the number one position using only natural search engine optimization? When I say natural search engine optimization I mean, their owners have not done any work on their sites at all, they have just produced very good content and over time people have recognized the quality and linked to it in some form or another. My guess and a very educated guess I might say, is probably anywhere in the region of none. Anyone who builds a website whether that is an individual like you and I or a company wants their site that they have spent time and effort working to be seen. Even if we only carry out the essential on-page SEO then that is, at minimum, still manipulating the search engine rankings in our favour. Isn't that what SEO is all about? Yes, but there is right ways to do SEO and wrong ways to SEO in an ethical sense.

Keeping Your Head Warm

You will often hear in internet marketing circles, terms like white hat, black hat and grey hat, so what exactly are these hats and which one should we be wearing? Normally that would depend a lot on the colour of your shirt and shoes but in this case it depends on your morals. The different colour hats represent the way in which you or the company you are paying carry out the search engine optimization on your site. White is the cleanest and morally correct way, through to black being classed as completely breaking the rules, and then grey merely bending them slightly. Let's break them down into a little more detail.

White Hat

As I said above white hat SEO is completely organic and comes from people or sites naturally linking to your content, over a very long time these links build up and in turn the pages on the site move up in the search engine rankings. More and more people like your site/pages and a snowball effect starts, and then sooner or later your site is getting closer to the top spot for a few keywords. Really though for this to happen, not only do you need to be very patient, your site has to be full of extremely good content even controversial, something that gets people talking. This is the basics of what is known as white hat SEO and the sort of search engine optimization that Google encourages.

Grey Hat

Grey hat SEO is what 90% of the community practice and along with the on-page SEO as outlined in Google's SEO guide, like using your keywords in the title, description and heading tags. Grey hat is more centred on the way links are built to your site, whereas with white hat, link building happens naturally, with grey hat, the links are purposely made with a view to increase the site position in the search engine rankings. How you set about building links to your site is up to you, there is certainly nothing illegal about using grey hat techniques and I'm quite sure that you won't go to prison for it. Will it or can it harm your site? At the moment the only thing I have seen is, if you build too many links to a new site then it can seem unnatural to Google and I have seen sites drop from an initially good position for a new site to going completely off the chart, could this be Google punishing the site aka "sandbox"? Th is is a common debate in many internet marketing forums at the moment. One thing we can be sure of is building thousands of links to an already established site cannot do it any harm, if it could then we could simply build thousands of links to our competitors sites and one by one knock them out of the rankings until we are left at the number one position. Obviously Google is not going to allow that. I would suggest that on a new site you get the on page SEO right and then start building links gradually until the site has matured and then step up the link building.

Black hat

Black hat SEO is like cheating the system, using underhand techniques to try to manipulate your way to the top of the search engines. This is short-term thinking, if you are trying to build an online presence using SEO then your plan should be genuine and long-term. Google is always changing the calculations they use determine where they position a site and they are doing it to give their customers the best possible experience. They don't want to show spam sites any more than we want to see them. Using white hat or the whiter side grey hat methods will always give you a better chance of a long-term successful business than trying to cheat your way to the top. If you can get there and stay there then the rewards will be so large that they will pay for all the hard work and patience ten times over.

Black Hat Techniques

Some examples of black hat techniques are:

Keyword stuffing, this is over using the keyword that you're trying to rank for, to the point where the text is unreadable. Do not confuse this with good on page SEO basics. Keyword density should be around one to two per cent and to the reader be undetectable.

Invisible text, this is colouring the text on the page the same colour as the back ground in order to trick the search engine spiders into thinking there is more keywords on that page than there really is.

This kind of search engine trickery does not work for long, if it works at all. At the end of the day wear a light grey hat that is closer to white, stick to the SEO basics and reap the rewards long-term.