SEO Techniques - White Hat vs Black Hat - Search Engines - SE Optimization

Search Engine Optimization aims to enhance the quality and volume of traffic to a website, and has fast become a lucrative industry. In fact, online advertising revenue overtook that of television in 2009. However, there are two sides to the SEO coin, and some of the techniques employed under the guise of SEO have a detrimental effect on the service as a whole.

SEO as a marketing strategy relies on specific and relevant keyword phrasing, improving website content, and providing quality inbound links in order to attract a higher level of traffic. These are some of the methods adopted by SEO companies and can be categorized as "white hat" in their ethicality and usefulness for users. On the other hand, "black hat" endeavours create a deceptive world of hidden text and keyword stuffing, which misleads users and provides them with an inferior service.

Although black hat SEO techniques can be effective in the short term, they more often than not prove to be very damaging to the website and consequently the business. The practitioners of these methods are aware that the end result of their actions will be the banning of their sites at the point at which they are discovered by the search engines. Alternatively, white hat SEO produces positive long term effects, and offers a far better service for businesses and their websites.

Some of the manifestations of black hat SEO include:

Hidden content - within the code for a site lies content packed with keywords often unrelated to the site the user is searching for, and which is invisible to the end user.

Doorway/Gateway Pages - pages designed for search engines rather than the user. They are fake pages which, again, are crammed with keywords and content which links to a landing page. The user clicking on this link will never see the intended pages as they will always be re-directed to the target page of the black hat designer.

White hat SEO techniques include the following:

Honest Titles and Meta Data - titles are highly significant in terms of semantic mark-up as the title informs us of the probable content of the page.

Effective Keyword Use - employing keywords that have been adequately researched and identified throughout a website, and are specific to the business.

While it is certain that SEO is an effective and successful means of better marketing one's website, it is necessary to be wary of the honesty and integrity of the techniques being employed in the campaign to raise traffic volumes, and convert those numbers into sales.