Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are highly complex and technical fields that are closer to programming than they are to marketing. Check out this guide for a primer on SEO.
What do Those Names Mean?
The term “white hat” and “black hat” is actually a hacking term that originated with old Western movies, where the villains would often wear black hats while the do-gooder heroes wore white. Hackers who practice legitimate and legal techniques and applications are called “white hats”, and those who use illegal and unethical practices are called “black hats”.
Why do People Use Black Hat Techniques?
Black hat techniques are often used to obtain visible short-term results. While unethical, they give marketers something to point to when asked about website performance. And even though it involves plenty of effort to pull off, it’s still less work than slowly building up your website’s ranking the traditional “white hat” way.
Keyword stuffing is one example of a black hat technique that could get you into trouble with Google. In it, a website owner crams the page with as many desired key words as possible without any concern for readability or customer experience, hoping to trick the search engine into ranking the site higher.
Invisible text works on the same principle as keyword stuffing, except that the text is the same color as the background (black on black, for instance), so that it’s not as obvious to web users.
Link farming is a technique that toes the line. A group of unrelated websites agree to link to each other for the sake of building up rank. While not illegal, it is a way to “game” a search engine that counts links to your site towards your popularity. This tricks the engine into giving you a higher rank than you actually deserve. A variation on this has site owners creating other sites that link to yours and pretending they belong to other people.
What are White Hat Techniques?
White hat techniques focus on “purer” ways of improving your site such as improving user experience, creating a search engine-friendly site, and not abusing web search functions. It takes a much longer time for your online reputation to develop, but the results are that much more credible and harder to lose than with black hat techniques.
Website optimization means going through your website’s back-end code and properly filling out meta descriptions, meta tags, keywords, and other information that search engines use to identify and classify your site. This also includes properly labeling images, web pages, and files so that they provide additional information.
Inter-linking is a practice where the pages within your website link to each other in organized and logical ways. A products page, for instance, can link directly to the service page, which links to the terms of service page, which leads back to the homepage. It helps search engines navigate your website and evaluate it in a realistic manner, since they can visit your entire website just like an actual user would.
Content marketing is a way of establishing a reputation for thought leadership both online and in your industry through blog posts, articles, and whitepapers on various industry-relevant topics. The theory behind it is that, if done right, your company will establish itself as an authority and have higher brand presence and reputation.
Which is Better?
While black hat techniques get instant results for comparatively little effort, these websites are under constant risk of being caught and shut down. Search engine companies have a lot of experience in detecting black hat sites and penalizing them. What works today may not work tomorrow, and may even get your site banned from that search engine in the process.
White hat techniques tend to fare much better in the long run thanks to their focus on customer experience and playing by the rules. Think of white hat techniques as an investment in online real estate. You have to build up your property brick by brick, making sure the site’s foundations are sound before attracting visitors with excellent content.
