Black and White Hat SEO

If you have ever read an article on Search Engine Optimisation techniques you may have come across the terms Black and White Hat SEO marketing. Below we take a look at what these terms mean and discuss some examples.

Black Hat SEO

Lets start with the bad first, Black Hat SEO refers to using unethical techniques to artificially improve your search engine rankings. Black Hat SEO should be avoided at all costs. If Google and its friends think your site is using dubious techniques to improve your page rankings your site will be penalised or worse still, banned from the search engines.

Invisible Text - The concept of invisible text on a website is to have lots of search engine rich content that is invisible to the eye but visible to a search engine, an example would be having white text over a white background. A visitor wouldn't be able to see this text but a search engine crawler would. The search engines have the capability detect and penalise any sites using this Black Hat technique.

Keyword Stuffing - Instead of having an informative, well structured paragraph, keyword stuffing is the art of writing content using as many search engine keywords as possible. A human wouldn't want to read this content and neither do the search engines so this is another big no-no!

Cloaking - A slightly more advanced Black Hat technique is called cloaking - this is where a website provides one page to human visitors and another page to search engines. This is a highly dangerous technique and should never be used.

White Hat SEO

Ok so thats the bad stuff, what do the good guys use?

Unique Content - As you have probably read before "Content is King", there is no substitute for quality unique content. Not only will people want to read it, the search engines will like it and it encourages other sites to link to your site.

Internal Linking - Each of the pages on your site should be linked together using basic html (no javascript or flash). This makes it easier for a search engine crawler to navigate your site and index all of the pages.

Site Optimisation - Search engines are happy for you to optimise certain areas on your site with keyword rich content, some examples would be page titles, heading titles and meta tags. It is important not to repeat keywords and phrases to much otherwise your site might be penalised for keyword stuffing.