White Hat SEO is what is considered legal and acceptable techniques to reach your search engine optimization goals. Black Hat SEO involves deploying illegal or unethical tricks to cut corners and increase your site’s ranking on search engine results pages. Let’s explore both SEO approaches a bit further.
What is Black Hat SEO?
Examples of black hat SEO are link buying, keyword stuffing, and invisible text, to name a few. Link buying is exactly what it sounds like. Buying backlinks to your site so that you can increase your search engine ranking is unethical
The field of web marketing keeps evolving, and as search engines continue to improve on their algorithms to better meet the search needs of their users, the definition of what is white hat SEO and black hat SEO continues to change as well.
When you’re debating between several different SEO companies, one thing you should definitely consider is which ones use white hat SEO and which ones employ black hat SEO. As you might already know, Google routinely scouts our websites that use illegal SEO practices and punishes them for their deceptive content marketing. Companies that use black hat SEO might try to convince you that their under-the-table techniques will guarantee you the results without getting caught by Google, Bing, etc. The reality is that there is no way that they can guarantee that your company won’t get caught and punished for its unethical practices. The fact is that the decision to use black hat SEO is an incredibly high-risk venture, and Google will punish your site by either filtering your search results rankings or even banning your site from Google. Clearly, the consequences are a lot more severe than the ephemeral benefits you might reap from black hat SEO.
I cannot stress this enough, Using Black Hat SEO will get your site punished by Google, and YOU will be the one to pay for this! (Companies that employ black hat techniques are notoriously not reputable and will not be willing or able to restore your good standing with Google once you get a penalty; contact us if you’ve been hit by a Google penalty and want to restore your good name.)
What is White Hat SEO?
White hat SEO are the techniques/practices that search engines deem acceptable in reaching your search engine marketing goals.
Examples of white hat SEO are: using SEO best practices, blogging with fresh/relevant content, social media, adding fresh content to your website, on-page optimization, etc. Essentially, fresh and relevant content lies at the crux of white hat SEO. However, there are also a few other techniques that are still considered white hat. To help you get off on the right foot, we’ve compiled a few white SEO techniques that are relatively simple to implement yet useful to your overall content marketing goals.
1) Gathering Organic Backlinks
Organic backlinks are an essential part of SEO, this is when someone chooses to link to your site b/c they like your content and think it is a valuable resource; backlinks are still the primary way that search engines determine rankings. Employing link building best practice techniques is essential for a successful SEO strategy. The way that you get organic backlinks is by having a quality site that has good content that others will find useful and will want to mention this content on their site/blog.
2) Title Tag Optimization
The title tag is the most important tag in web marketing. Make sure you put your high-priority keywords near the beginning of your title tag. Ideally, your title tag will be less than 65 characters or less. Also, don’t forget to embed your title keywords throughout the rest of your page.
3) Don’t Forget About Tags
The description Meta tag contains the text that will be displayed when your web page appears in search engine results pages. Include keywords and keep it to less than 200 characters (any more than that, and most likely, your text will get cut off).
White Hat SEO Always Beats Black Hat SEO
White hat SEO is reliable. We discourage the use of black hat SEO because black hat SEO is frowned upon by search engines like Google, and if you are caught using black hat SEO tricks (such as link farms), then your site will be punished and might even get banned by Google. The short-term benefits of black hat SEO simply do not outweigh its severe consequences. We hope you found this blog helpful, and if you want to learn more about SEO companies that use white hat SEO, feel free to give us a call. Connect with our SEO team today by dialing (973) 346-8100.