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.

SEO Techniques - Techniques that Need to be Avoided

The search engines are aware of the many sneaky ways that webmasters (or search engine optimizers) try to achieve high ranks. In SEO industry, these sneaky activities are called as spamming techniques. If search engines discover that you are trying to cheat them by any of the following black hat SEO techniques, your site may be penalized! Your rank may be downgraded, or your page or even your whole site could be banned. Even if your site is never caught and punished, it’s very likely, we dare say inevitable, that you’re tricky SEO techniques will eventually stop working. The followings are few of those Black Hat SEO techniques that have been on the search engines’ no-no list for so long that they can safely be labeled as “Eternally Bad for your Site”.

When a search engine robot visits your site, it expects to see the same content that any normal human visitor would see. Cloaking is a method of identifying robots when they visit your site and showing them special, custom-made pages that are different from what human visitors see and only optimized for getting traffic for a particular search term which is not relevant to the page's content. This thwarts the search engines in their attempt to deliver the most accurate search results to their users. In the vast universe of website technology, there are sometimes valid reasons for showing different content to different entities. Tricking the search engines to give you higher ranks than you deserve is not one of them.

Duplicate content Are you the kind of person who thinks, “If one aspirin works, why not take two?” If so, you might be thinking that if one paragraph of keyword-rich text will help your ranks, why not put it on every page in your site? Or worse, if one website brings you sales, why not make a bunch of identical websites with different names and get even more sales? The problem with this kind of thinking is that it ignores the big headache it causes for searchers. If the search engines listed identical content multiple times, it would destroy the diversity of their results, which would destroy their usefulness to the searcher. So, if the search engines catch on to duplicate content schemes, they’re likely to knock you down in the ranks.

Keyword stuffing is the technique of adding a keyword list to the visible text on your page is not exactly scintillating copy. I am not talking about overly optimized text, which may come off as pointless and dry. I am talking about repeating the same word or words over and over again so that your page looks like an industry-specific grocery list. At best, sites that do this cause eyestrain for their visitors. At worst, they’re risking penalties from the search engines. There’s a place for your keywords list. It’s called your Meta keywords tag. Avoid Keyword Stuffing at all costs.


The spamming techniques that I discussed above are needed to be avoided if you really want to build a Search Engine friendly site. A site should be build for human visitors not for search engine spiders.

Advantage of Organic Search Engine Rankings

PPC is the best way to get people to your website instantly. Still the benefits of organic search engines rankings can easily ignore the advantages of PPC. And when I say organic search engine rankings, I’m talking about the non-sponsored results you see on the left hand side of the screen when you do a search in Google, Yahoo, MSN, or your favorite search engine.

I want to take a few minutes here to explain why every webmaster needs to be spending at least a little time making sure their website is optimized for the search engines.

Ad Blindness

Almost 80% web users ignore PPC advertising. Although the Ads show up on the page, but the savvy Internet users don’t even see them. They’re only concerned with the “natural” or “organic” listings. That means that if you are using only PPC to generate revenue for your business, you’ll be busy fighting with all the other advertisers for a mere 15% of the market while those who focused on getting high search engine rankings (for organic listings) have 100% of market available to them.


Organic Listings More Trusted

There is also a trust factor for organic listings. People are naturally skeptical of advertisers. It’s just the nature of the beast. In fact, over 90% of Internet users trust the organic search engine results more than they trust sponsored results. As you may be starting to realize you’re facing an uphill battle when a visitor does decide to click on your PPC advertisement. Not only are most of users ignoring you, eliminating a big portion of your potential market, most of them are clicking on your ad with a lot of skepticism.


Organic Listings Are Free

And if the fact that your message is more trusted and not ignored with natural search engine rankings haven’t convinced you to at least give it a try, then you may want to know that natural search engine rankings are Free! You don’t have to pay to get a top search engine ranking, and you never have to pay a fee when someone clicks on a link to visit your website. While not all search engine rankings last, especially if you neglect them, some of them can last indefinitely. If you have a quality website that ranking in top 10 search engine rankings, then it is easy to maintain the position by just updating it frequently. But you have to maintain the relevancy of your site’s content, i.e. never focus on a single topic.

If you’re not already taking advantage of natural search engine rankings to drive traffic (and sales!) to your website, then it’s time to get started. And SEO Techniques is the process by which you can maximize your site’s exposure in different search engines and improve your ranking in organic listings.