White Hat and Black Hat in SEO

After website development, the latest technology is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There are certain ways to get a good page rank by using SEO techniques. As we all know that there are two sides of a coin, in the same way, there are two sides of these techniques as well. Two terms have been coined to define these two techniques – “White Hat” and “Black Hat” SEO techniques. As the names suggest, white hat techniques are fair while the black hat techniques are unfair. Black hat techniques may show positive results in the beginning, but it is does not stand up in the long run. Here we will be discussing some of the white hat and black hat techniques in SEO to make you aware of them.

White Hat Techniques:

• Content Quality: It is the most important aspect from a user perspective and hence for SEO as well. What matters for a reader is the content on the page, and if it is relevant, the user will stay on it.
• Good Mark Up Structure: If the semantic structure of the webpage is good, then it lays required emphasis on the headings and title. Provide adequate stress on the use of keywords in meta-tags. It also makes the task of Search Engine easier to search for the content.
• Inbound Links’ Quality: The links to your webpage should be from websites that are highly regarded by the search engines and not from websites which have been penalized or banned by the search engines.
• Keyword Choice and Use:  Give appropriate effort to choose effective keywords for your website and use them throughout the content. Single word keywords are not always the best ones, try and use multiword or phrases as keywords. Also use these keywords in all the important elements of page.

Black Hat Techniques:

• The topper in the list of black hat techniques is “hidden text”. Hidden text is used to increase the number of keywords in the text so as to fool the Search Engine about the relevance of the page.  If your website uses these techniques and get penalized, then the penalties could range to banning of the site. Hidden text can be used in two ways:

• Comment: the actual purpose of comment is to help the developer in the form of reminder or description, but it can be incorrectly used for the promotion of a not so relevant page. For e.g., for a page targeting page rank, comments can be written as <!- Page rank, page ranks, increase page rank, page rank increment techniques->
• <noscript> tag: It is commonly used to inform the user that your browser does not support a script that has been used here. As an example of its use as black hat technique for tour package is:

<noscript>

Imaginary tour package firms provide tour packages which are not tour packages; our firm is authentic tour package firm, contact for tour packages.

</noscript>

• Meta-tag Keywords: There are two meta-tags – description and keyword, if these meta-tags are filled with unnecessary redundant keywords, then it is considered black hat. For e.g., <meta name=”keywords” content=”ice-cream, ice-creams, cool ice-cream, icy ice-cream, cold ice-cream, lovely ice-creams”>.
• Link Farming: This serves no other purpose but to list links of websites that are not related.

• Gateway pages or Doorway: These are the pages specially designed for SEOs and not for the user. Usually these are fake pages and are highly optimized for some keywords. They are automatically redirected to another page, hence, the user never has a chance to see them.

The suggestion is to choose the white hat amongst the white hat and black hat in SEO if you want a good future for your website.