How You Can Differentiate Between Black Hat and White Hat SEO

SEO has dramatically evolved since its origins and as a result, SEO has become an integral part of online marketing companies in Utah and other states in the country.

The term SEO seems to have been used for the first time by Boy Heyman and Leland Harden, according to MarketingLand. Heyman, who was the senior vice president of audience development at Cybernautics, was working with the rock band Jefferson Starship. Back then, the band’s manager complained about appearing in page four of the search results in the summer of 1995.

Web designers then solved that problem by putting tiny black text against a black background. Nowadays, that would fail to place a web site in the first page of Google search results because of the algorithm Google uses. Google and other search engines now concentrate in quality content. Unfortunately, some online marketers will still engage in what is called Black Hat SEO.

Black Hat SEO

Practices that violate search engine guidelines to increase page rankings are called Black Hat SEO. These practices tend to be directed towards making sites visible to the search engines without adding value to the user. Among these practices there is hidden text (or links), keyword stuffing, cloaking, falsely reporting a competitor, and more.

Some other techniques online marketers in Utah and across the nation use include paid links, link schemes, link farms, automated search engine queries and article spinning. All of these practices may help improve page ranking without adding value to consumers and should therefore be reported.

White Hat SEO

White Hat SEO is the one that will create a long-lasting online presence for you or your client’s business. Good keywords, descriptive meta tags, quality content, quality links and more make up good practices that will help improve the page ranking of any website while still adding value to the consumers. You may obtain quality links through healthy link-building activities, such as skyscrapers.

Online marketers should keep paying attention to any changes in the webmasters guidelines each search engine has. By doing so, they will prevent falling into bad practices that will only harm their business.

Esteban De Hoyos writes for Fusion 360, an advertising agency in Utah. He writes for many other clients as well.

* Image Credit: Flickr and Wikipedia