Understanding white hat & black hat SEO methods

The great world of SEO has many benefits to offer those who are willing to adapt to the changing online world. If you don’t already know search engine optimisation, or SEO, is all about optimising your website so that it appears higher on the results page for search engines. This includes all of them such as Google, Bing and even Yahoo. The reason why people are aiming for that number one spot is that it is common knowledge that things rarely get clicked on if they are on the second page.

Understanding white hat and black hat SEO methods

Websites at the top of the first page drive the most traffic and from such are very competitive. But how do you achieve those results? There are many different methods that you can do for SEO that ultimately fall under the categories of white hat and black hat. Below we will discuss these categories and the impact they have on your website.

White hat

White hat methods refer to the good things you can do to boost your ranking organically. That means that the things that you are doing have been approved by the companies that created the algorithm that gives websites their own rankings. It is highly recommended that if you are planning on implementing SEO to your website that you only use white hat methods. Using black hat methods could result in some serious punishments if you are caught doing it.

When you enlist the services of a digital marketing agency they should be using white hat methods. While black hat may give you a quick initial bump, the long term gain of white hat is a lot more beneficial and you don’t run the risk of your website being penalised.

Backlinking is a common white hat method that a lot of people implement into their SEO campaigns. Backlinking is the method of creating and hosting content on other websites that links back to your own. The content should be engaging and  high quality so as to attract the reader’s attention and wanting them to click onto your website to see what you are all about. The goal behind this is to get more traffic to your website and multiple platforms hosting your content so that search engines know you are a trustworthy source.

Black hat

Understanding white hat and black hat SEO methods

While white hat is the good things you can do for your website, black hat is seen as the more unethical methods that while do give results are considered bad. It is very hard to try and fool one of algorithms run by these search engine companies and if they do catch you using any of them they could potentially punish your website.

Punishments include having your website removed from their search results page altogether which means you won’t be appearing on Google at all. The only way people will be able to get to your website is through direct address bar searches or from referrals. This can really hamper your long term online presence and from such it is recommended that you avoid them.

Some of those methods include the following;

Invisible text

Invisible text on landing pages is usually a bunch of relevant and high priority keywords that get bots confused and rank pages higher for those terms.

Keyword stuffing

Similar to invisible text, keyword stuffing aims to trick the bots into thinking that your content is including a certain term so many times so that it will rank it for that term.

Spam

Spamming links to your website from multiple low quality websites will also get you penalised. If you notice an agency using any of these methods be sure to avoid them.