The practice of White Hat Search Engine Optimization, also known as Ethical SEO. The White Hat Techniques are ethical whereas Black Hat Techniques are not. It aims to make it easier for the search engines to tell when your site’s content is relevant to a query. In most cases, we do this by building a site genuinely more useful to its human visitors, so that they will recommend it to others by linking it from their own websites.
The business of search engine optimization is infected with scammers, swindlers, spammers and fraud artists as well. They are the Bad Guys of the Internet, and so like, we say they wear Black Hats.
The White Hat approach to SEO focuses on using clean code and verified optimization techniques, while avoiding all issues that could result in a penalty from a search engine. Most penalties result in reduced rank positions for a site. Penalties for violations may result in the banning of a site, which is the complete removal of a site from a search engine’s database. If your Web site is banned from a major search engine like Google, or the traffic to your site from Google and affiliated search engines such as Bing and Yahoo.
To improve a Web page’s position in a SERP, you have to know how search engines work. Search engines categorize Web pages based on keywords — important terms that are relevant to the content of the page.
Which are the Most Effective SEO Techniques?
- Meta tags provide information about Web pages to computer programs but aren’t visible to humans visiting the page. You can create a Meta tag that lists keywords for your site.
- Your pages are well structured (with headers and sub headers etc.).
- One place you should definitely include keywords is in the title of your Web page and that you build many keyword rich inbound links.
- Use descriptive page titles and other page text. Another good place to use keywords is in headers. If your page has several sections, consider using header tags and include important keywords in them. And your pages are indexed.
- If you use a keyword too many times, some search engine spiders will flag your page as spam. That’s because of a black hat technique called keyword stuffing, but more on that later.
The Black hat approach, on the other hand, is fraught with risk because of its intentional or unintentional disregard for the rules as set forth by the major search engines. There aren’t many risks associated with White Hat SEO techniques, because the White Hat approach seeks to follow the rules to avoid penalty situations.
Basics of White Hat SEO:
- Create targeted content
- Build relationships
- Target anchor text based on keywords
- Links drive Google’s algorithm
Keywords aren’t the only important factor search engines take into account when generating SERP’s. Just because a site uses keywords well doesn’t mean it’s one of the best resources on the Web. To determine the quality of a Web page, most automated search engines use link analysis. Link analysis means the search engine looks to see how many other Web pages link to the page in question.
Is Search Engine Optimization Ethical?
The achievement of a search engine depends importantly on delivering search results that are as relevant as possible to each query and useful and interesting to the searcher. Whenever a Black Hat succeeds by capturing a search engine’s traffic, their visitors soon figure out they have been had and instead try their search on a different search engine. There is no ticket to easy street.
Success on the web, lasting success, takes long hard work. A search for “search engine optimization” at any of the search engines yields page after page of both result listings and advertisements claiming top ten placement and quick results.
- Results are never guaranteed.
- Results are never quick.
One can use SEO to push whatever ideas they like though. Search engine optimization is just a means to help distribute your message. Calling search engine optimization unethical is similar to calling creating a website or printing a newspaper unethical. SEO itself should not generally be fixed to any ethics guideline.
It is in fact quite possible to make a great deal of quick, easy money by spamming the search engines. Unsolicited email messages are spam because they shift the marketing time and cost from the marketer to the person opening their email.
Google’s guidelines are quite clear on things like hidden text and hidden links to duplicate content. People should have a dubious reaction when someone comes trying to buy links to spam/duplicate pages. Once a site is well-established in the search engines, referrals to new content can show up in less than a week. But it takes time before the search engines learn your site is worth treating well, time for your visitors to learn about your site and for some to link it from their sites, and time for the search engines to learn that your site is so highly regarded by others.
If you succeed with your unethical website optimization well enough to become a high-traffic site, you could fare even worse, as you might get caught. From time to time, each search engine improves their search algorithms in ways that tend to defeat search engine spammers and promote rightful websites.
