White Hat vs. Black Hat SEO

Online marketing is one of the recent marketing strategies which most companies and corporations have been steadily adopting in the recent past. For its effectiveness and efficiency, the web page in which the advert has been posted must rank on the first page of the search engine; be it Google, Yahoo or any other search engine.

This ranking can only be achieved through a well-tailored content which can be visible to both the search engine and human beings. Remember, search engines have the ability to craw the web to gather and interpret the information on the web page.

This can only be achieved through search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. The higher a web page is ranked in any search engine, the higher the possibility that a particular search engine will naturally receive more visitors. For this reason, SEO is one of the sought-after technique in the current era where online marketing is the only way to reach a larger audience. Broadly, there are two main types of SEO; the white hat and the black hat SEO.
All the two types of SEO are all geared towards improving traffic going to a particular web site. The main difference which exist between the two, is the kind of techniques employed to achieve higher ranking in search engines.

• The white hat SEO

This refers to the acceptable practices of achieving higher rankings in search engines. They conform to all the rules and regulation guiding SEO work. It’s approved by most search engines and its results are last for longer period of time.

A white hat SEO involves the following strategies:

Writing quality content; it is one of the main building blocks of website optimization. Remember, the search engine crawls through the website looking for key phrases. The aim of the search engine is to get appropriate content which it believes will satisfy all the needs of the end user. The content must be well-written with sufficient content about any key phrase in question.
This also goes hand in hand with the structural design of the content. All mark ups must be structured semantically as it’s the only way through which search engines can get the gist of the content.
Titles and Meta data; titles give content much weight when they are being searched by the search engine. The titles must be chosen appropriately as they give a brief summary of what the content is all about. As for the case of Meta data, they must also be used appropriately for better results to be achieved.

Keywords;

a thorough research on keyword and key phrases is important. The keyword must be specific and to the point. They must be those that website users might use while searching for a specific content.
Inbound links; even though this is one of the most popularly used technique, choosing the best links is always an added advantage as it will most definitely make the web page to be among the top in any search engine. It’s advisable to generate these links from a reputable websites.

• The black hat SEO

These are ways through which people try to improve the ranking of their websites by violating some of the stipulated guidelines of the search engines. It involves deception. It’s not recommended and such sites can either be penalized or de-indexed.

This technique is characterized by:
Hidden content; content is normally hidden from the end user using CSS, colored text and very small texts. Usually, within the site’s code, there’s a lot of targeted stuffed keywords.
Besides this, it also involve unacceptable Meta description and Meta keyword stuffing. Most search engines can always detect this and consequently de-index the site.
Gateway pages; these pages are usually designed for the search engines and not the web page visitor. In black SEO, these pages are usually stuffed with the targeted keywords to enhance the site’s visibility.
Link farming; in this process, a list of unrelated is availed to the user.
The white hat SEO is the most recommended technique for any individual who would wish to improve his or her site ranking.