SEO Tactics Defined – Black White and Grey Hats

Any company wishing to utilise SEO Tactics or search engine marketing techniques should be aware of the three main categories:

• Black Hat SEO
• White Hat SEO
• Grey Hat SEO

This refers to the heroes and villains depicted in old time cinema – the hero always wore a white hat, while the villain was identified by his black headwear. Grey hats equal a ‘grey’ area that may or may not be ethical.

The following is a brief description of each type.

Black Hat SEO Tactics

Black hat SEO Tactics are considered misleading. These are some of the more common black hat techniques used by unscrupulous firms:

• Search engine regulations and rules are purposely broken.

• Negative interference with a user’s website experience.

• Content is presented to search engine spiders and users in a way that is not only misleading, it is unethical.

Specifically, here are some of the ways these techniques are accomplished:

• Keyword Stuffing – Placing keywords in a meaningless jumble of text.

• Invisible Text – White text on white background, which is not visible to the human eye, but can be picked up by search engine bots.

• Doorway Pages – Creating a basically nonexistent page purely to attract search spiders.

The risks of utilising black hat SEO are many. If your company is recognised as the perpetrator of black hat techniques, it will alienate both present and potential customers. Major search engines may also ban your URL from appearing in keyword result lists.

According to Google and Yahoo, two of the largest search engines, ignorance is not an acceptable defence. So if you are employing a marketing firm to perform SEO services for your company, be sure you know what colour of hat they are wearing.

White Hat SEO Tactics

A better way to achieve higher search engine page ranking is through acceptable means. These include:

• Indexing and Linking – Properly link the pages of your website in a way that search engine crawlers can find, and index, them. A site map and navigation buttons on each page are both great ways to accomplish this easily.

• Link Exchange – Post the URL of a site with similar content on a links page and ask them to do the same for you. Simple and effective.

• Content – Providing unique, quality, informative content is always the best way to achieve higher search engine rankings. This method is an organic one and is not the easiest, but certainly the best.

• Proper SEO – Refer to the articles specifically addressing this topic to learn about effective ways to gain the notice of search engine crawlers.

Grey Hat SEO Tactics

Finally, grey hat techniques are those that walk the line between acceptable and deplorable. Be careful that you, or your marketing firm, do not fall into the trap of thinking that these methods are truly better than those listed in the black hat category.

• Website Cloaking – Purposely presenting different information to search engines than to visitors.

• Paying for links on other websites – Done solely to increase link popularity, and thus page ranking.

• Duplicate content – Posting the same articles on various URL’s. This often results in the site being penalized by search engines.

At worst, these could bring your website under scrutiny of your web hosting site or the major search engines. Often, grey hat methods are considered another form of spam. Either way, they are hardly better than the most misleading of SEO Tactics.

Wouldn’t you rather be the ‘good guy’? Remember to employ only white hat techniques to increase your site’s page ranking as well as to demonstrate your good citizenship in the internet marketing world (which is massive but when it comes to integrity, is much smaller than you think!).