Well, we all know there are always two sides of a coin. It is pretty much the same with SEO rankings. SEO ranking can be improved with two different types of strategies. The White Hats and the Black Hats. Although there is also a Gray Hat strategy but we will keep this article focused on the first two. In this article we will go through the details of how they operate and what you should opt for. But first it is important to understand what does White Hat and Black Hat means in terms of SEO.
White Hats
In simple words, White hat refers to strictly playing by the rules. With the ever increasing need of SEO uk.advfn.com, search engines have laid down some ethics and rules, which they obliged WebMasters to follow. White Hats tends to follow these rules. It is more focused towards the human audience. It generally involves practices/methods keeping an eye on moral and legal values. It also focuses on a long term relation between the user and website.
Strategies:
Following are the strategies used by the white hats:
Focused on human audience:
White hat strategy tends to focus more on human audience rather than finding tricks to deceive search engine ranking mechanism.
Updated and fresh content:
They make sure all your content is fresh and updated as required. It is focused more towards quality of your websites content, which in turns attracts search engines.
Designing user friendly website:
User friendly website is another key strategy used by white hats. Your website will be redesigned to make sure there is a positive user experience. Optimizing or creating mobile version of your website.
Adding links:
Adding relevant links on your website of well-known organizations and industries. Also adding links of your content on other well-known related websites to build reputation.
Relevant and Optimized Images:
It focuses on images as a key competent and optimizes it, as required. They use images of excellent quality, right size and backed up with relevant keywords.
Effective Keywords:
Keywords are a major part in any type of SEO strategy. White hats use more effective and relevant keywords, keeping in view the content of your website.
Natural Keyword Density:
Keyword density refers to the amount of certain keywords showing up in a particular page with relevance to the searching keywords by a user. White hat method emphasizes on using keywords in a more natural and relevant way rather than stuffing keywords unnecessarily.
Black Hats
Unlike its counter-part, Black-Hat strategy tends to manipulate and take advantages of the weaknesses in the process and algorithm of leading search engines. Completely ignoring the fact of human experience. They ignore the policies and guidelines outlined by the search engines and find easier ways to achieve the SEO ranking. It is effective for short term and at the same time very risky. Your website can end up being penalized.
Strategies:
Following are the strategies used by Black Hats:
Focused on machine flaws:
The whole strategy is based on flaws, as it completely ignores the human experience factor. Black hats exploit the weaknesses in the SEO ranking process to their advantage.
Copied and redundant content:
As I have discussed earlier how black hats ignores the human experience factor from there strategy. This makes the content less relevant, as they are focused on machine strategy. You will find most of the content on such websites, redundant and scrapped from other available content on internet, rather than proper updated research and quality content.
Cloaking:
Cloaking involves deceiving the search engines and website visitors with different contents. Imagine opening a link from your search, which redirects you to a totally different website. It is also a violation of Googles WebMaster Guidelines, because in many cases it tricks the visitors to a totally different and irrelevant website.
Gateway Pages/Doorway Pages:
A Doorway/Gateway/Jump page is a deceptive page filled with keywords, for specific searches and then redirects the visitor to another link or page.
Keywords Stuffing:
As oppose to White hats, Black hats dont shy off from stuffing the pages with keywords. No matter how much nuisance it is for the visitor, the keyword seems to be everywhere and incase of any article; you will find that specific keyword to repeat unnecessarily and unnaturally. Although, it is not as effective as it was earlier. Search engines have long pointed out this technique as unethical and have made sure its no longer effective as it was earlier.
Spamming through Blogs/Comments:
If you have experienced writing for blogs or visit such websites, you will see these unnecessary and irrelevant comments to show up on your blog or website. I hope you dont consider them as real persons, because they are not. These are most probably black hats spamming backlinks.
Irrelevant Links/ Link Farming:
The strategy involves giving links of irrelevant and redundant websites and also spamming your link on irrelevant link farming websites. This completely negates the relevancy and the quality of content available on such websites.
Hidden Text:
You must be thinking this cant be true. Hidden text? Yes. Imagine browsing a page with black background, and that black background is stuffed with keywords in black color text. A normal visitor wont be able to notice that but the Search Engines will identify the text on the page.
Conclusion
It should be quiet obvious for us to conclude now that which strategy we should opt for. Black Hats is effective for a very short period and the risks are too high. It is likely that your website will end up being penalized. It also completely ignores the human experience factor, so most of the times dont expect returning visitors.
While on the other hand White hat focuses more on long-term and a permanent reputation for your website. They also leave a very positive user experience, which helps in developing loyal visitors and potential customers. This helps your business/organization to expand, build reputation and stay on top results of search engines for a longer period of time.