SEO Hats: Why Black Doesn’t Cut it Anymore

There are three distinct Search Engine Optimisation techniques: the white hat, the gray hat, and the black hat. As their colors suggest, they’re the good and evil of search engine optimisation. SEO, unlike SEM, is not just about making specific websites rank better in search engine directories. SEO is also about making the directory more systematic, and black hat SEO, because the techniques are very wily, tend to go against that very principle.

Black Hat

Are you familiar with key word usages? Key words are phrases that search engine crawlers can recognize from a website’s textual content so they can group and rank these websites according to their relevance. Unfortunately, the system is flawed because it doesn’t have the capacity to recognize what is actually relevant for human beings. Instead, it takes a slight shortcut. It counts how many times a certain keyword is repeated throughout the text.

Black hat SEO takes advantage of this flaw by stuffing the textual content of websites with keywords. It doesn’t matter if the article still reads well. Sometimes, they even embed hidden text into the page (or text that’s just the same color as the background) so that website visitors will be tricked into clicking on the link even if the website doesn’t have anything to do with their actual query. It’s called black hat because once these websites are reported, they’re also black listed from the search engines permanently.

While these websites might be on top of the search engine lists faster than their competition, they can also be permanently taken out of it on the same week. It’s not really an effective technique because it’s short lived.

White Hat

White hat SEO is the antithesis of black hat SEO because it prioritized human readers all the time. The only disadvantage here is that the results can take months to process. Most of the time, the website’s popularity is derived from other efforts such as self promotions using social media networks. The good thing about it, though is that the results are long term. The minute the website gains its leverage because of loyal visitors, they eventually rank better in search engines. This technique takes a lot of time and patience, though.

Gray Hat

Marketers often claim that there is no such thing as a white hat SEO technique. No marketer really puts ethics on top of website popularity. Gray hat SEO is somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. Websites using this SEO technique use keywords but do not overuse them. They also use informational text, but they don’t do so just because they think it’s ethical and it’s for the greater good of search engines online. Informational text is used as a tool to attract traffic, too. Perhaps white and gray hat SEO are pretty similar. The only thing separating them is them marketer’s motivation.

Ignition Media strictly only use White Hat SEO techniques on all Search Engine Optimisation and website promotion project. For a free website analysis, website report and SEO proposal contact Ignition Media.