SEO Techniques - Black Hat, White Hat and Grey Hat

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important aspect of any online business who wants to do well. Without SEO, your products and services may never reach the potential clients even if your products or services are the best among all others. If you are an SEO specialist then you must know about all the SEO techniques which are used for promotion of your site which include both ethical SEO techniques that is recommended by search engines, and also the unethical SEO techniques that are discouraged by the search engines.

White Hat SEO (The Recommended Way)
White hat SEO refers to the SEO techniques that goes with the guidelines laid down by search engines and are considered as ethical search engine optimization techniques. These include high quality and updated content, proper use of keywords and metadata, use of alt tags, descriptive file names, user friendly internal navigation structure, SEO link building including internal links, and other such SEO strategies which the search engines recommend. In white hat SEO techniques, the pages are built keeping the human visitors in mind. They do not try to deceive humans or the search engines. Implementing these natural search engine optimization techniques may take a little time and effort, but their results last a longer time and you don’t have to worry about having your site banned by search engines for use of deceptive practices.

Black Hat SEO (The Unethical Way)
Black hat SEO on the other hand refers to all the unethical search engine optimization techniques which the search engines discourage. These consist of keyword stuffing, hidden text, meta tag stuffing, doorway pages, hidden links, using link farms, cloaking, and other such search engine optimization techniques. The pages in black hat SEO are built not for humans but for the search engine spiders. They are designed to get better rankings on major search engines. The flip side is that they run the risk of being banned by the search engines once they are found out. The major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN believe that pages should be built for humans and provide them the information and data they are looking for. By using Black hat SEO techniques you build pages for the spiders to trick them and in turn give your visitors a bad experience.

Choosing Between the Two (The Grey Hat)
What SEO techniques you choose is entirely upon you. While white hat SEO will take you time and efforts, it will give long lasting results and can be helpful in long run. On the other hand, black hat SEO will probably give you much faster results, maybe even getting you in the top slot, but runs the risk of getting your site banned from the search engines. Standing in the middle, or using a mix of the two, can prove beneficial only if the amount of black hat SEO tactics incorporated in your search engine optimization strategy is the minimum basic.

As you increase your black hat tactics more, you increase your chances of being banned. On the other hand, using a few tactics to get quick results till your white hat SEO tactics start showing results may be okay if you are sure to remove the black hat techniques soon. But if you can, it would be best to avoid all the black hat techniques and stick to ethical search engine optimization. It would give you good results that last longer.

Needless to say, an ethical SEO company will follow only white hat methods and you can blindly rely upon them with their organic SEO services to keep your websites up on grounds of ethical search engine optimization.