Black Hat vs White Hat

Content is King

Content on your website will be the key element that will separate you from the competition. Great content will result in Google finding you relevant and placing you in a good position. Having good content will also increase the chances of other websites linking to your site.

If your content is not quality your website will have nothing to market. Google will derive the majority of its information on page relevance from your content. This alone is how you will be able to secure a top placement.

‘Backlinks are Queen’

Google uses inward links to your website to rank how important your website is and therefore where to rank it. Google relies heavily on and gives great weight to what other websites are saying about your website. This is because other websites are more likely to be impartial and truthful about your website.

You should aim for white label link building practices to gain ‘quality’ backlinks. These are links located on a web page that is relative to your website. For instance, for my website, I would place a link in a forum about web design and development, or a listing directory under the web design and development section.

 

META Tags

META Tags are used to tell Google what your website is about and build an accurate theme. They also describe your website in the search results. The three main META Tags are as follows:

META Title: Displayed at the top of your browser window and in the title of Google’s returned result for your page.

META Description: This contains the description of your page for other search engines to display. Google looks at this tag but displays its own description, picked from your page.

META Keywords: Here you can list the keywords that are relevant to your page.

All tags should be written page specific. If you do not use your keywords in your content, Google will not be able to see the relevance of your website.

Search engine spiders are very sophisticated and can tell the difference between the efforts of a black hat and a white hat. In order to avoid having a black mark against your website using white hat search engine optimization (SEO) techniques wherever possible to make you stand out in search results.

We compare different methods of increasing your visibility and how this can be done with both techniques.

 

META TAGS

White Hat SEO:

There are many keywords that you could use but choose solid meta tags that will accurately represent your company and what it stands for.

Black Hat SEO:

Overloading your meta tags with not improve your presence but can spam your website. It is important to ensure all keywords are captured and this avoids one being missed but stuffing with keywords can be very damaging if alerted to Google.

 

CONTENT

Wesley, founder of Cude Design, gave his insight into black hat vs white hat SEO techniques when optimizing your written content

White Hat SEO:

Any web content that has relevant keywords and phrases on each of your landing pages is a winner every time. Once you have chosen your keywords use them throughout your content but don’t overuse them. Google recommends 3-4% keyword density. This will ensure your content is visible and hopefully stand out from the crowd. This method of SEO is the most effective and but can take a long time to see results.

Black Hat SEO:

It is possible to have content hidden, whichever way you choose to do this, it is all classed as black hat. A possible way to hide content is to have white text with lots of keywords on a white background. The content will not be visible to the naked eye but it would still be picked up by search engines. This is great for this reason but it is another example of spamming. Another method would be to use comment tags in order to hide keywords.

Remember if you are not using any of the white hat SEO techniques suggested your efforts will not be effective and you may not see the result you are hoping for.

 

LINKING

White Hat SEO:

The purpose of link building or commonly known as inbound links is that you want another person’s page to show links to your own. This can be done through a blog post. Anyone that decides to click on this link through to your website is classed as a quality link. It is worth bearing in mind that this is time-consuming as you need to find other websites that will provide inbound links.

Black Hat SEO:

The black hat version is known as link farming. Your intention is purely to increase your site ranking in search engines. And why this may work brilliantly in the short term and get you to your ideal position in the long run search engines will work out if you are trying to fool them and block your website. A search engine like Google would identify how many links there are back to your site in order to rank. Enjoy the popularity while it lasts if you choose this method.

The major advantage of black hat SEO is that you can expect results very quickly but the journey back down can be just as quick.

 

Google AdWords

With Google AdWords, you can be on the first page of Google within minutes. Your ad will appear in the sponsored listing alongside the natural listings and you only have to pay a fee when you receive clicks on your ad.

The main benefit of AdWords is that you instantly advertise your website under your desired keywords and to your target audience. Due to this, your conversion rate will be higher than if you target people at random.

Your Ad will not be only listed on Google but their partners too. This includes the likes of AOL, ASK, and Lycos. By placing your ad on Google AdWords and its partners you can potentially reach 80% of the internet.