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Step 2 - The Hats of SEO
Don’t get carried away with your competitiveness and eagerness to dominate the rankings by entertaining ideas of performing questionable or unethical SEO methods. There’s everything to lose and only little, if anything, to gain in the short-term by doing gray or black hat SEO.
We need to inform you about the distinction between white, gray, and black hat because you might have been paying for gray or black hat SEO in the past and you didn’t even know about the risk and potential harm facing your business.
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Within the past few years, the white, gray, and black hat terms have come about to describe the ethics underlying SEO techniques.
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Some methods are definitively black hat while professionals in the SEO community dispute over what is actually gray. Do only white hat SEO and you're in the clear.
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White hat methods are clean, ethical, and viable techniques that search engines accept, and the outcome is that your pages get readily indexed and are on the path to moving up in the rankings. These ethical methods will not put your site at risk nor will your site incur any penalties from the search engines.
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The overarching aim of the white hat approach is to feed search engine robots high quality, relevant, optimized text on the front-end and back-end so that both site visitors and search engines benefit. It is noteworthy to mention that white hat SEO is a gradual, fluid, and ongoing process that preserves the integrity of your business brand and website in both the short and long term.
If it helps when you are doing SEO, remember Google's corporate mantra - "Don't Be Evil." Amit Patel, a Google engineer who has been with the company since its inception, actually coined this phrase which was well-received by Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
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At any rate, black hat techniques put your site at great risk of being penalized by search engines. The underlying motive for using these methods is to deceive and trick the search engines into yielding higher rankings. Doing black hat SEO means that one unscrupulously employs any method it takes to get first page rankings.
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Black hat methods are also referred to as spamdexing. Many search engines monitor for spamdexing and will remove suspicious pages from their indices. Yet with these great risks involved, an appreciable number of SEO firms out there are still doing black hat SEO.
With this approach, the focus is misplaced; it’s only about getting ranked and not about what your customers seek, want, and need. On top of that, how about getting your site banned from major search engines altogether? More...
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On the SEO color spectrum, gray hat SEO methods expectedly fall between white and black with respect to the level of risk taken to get ranked. You may incur penalties from search engines but you’re not likely to get booted from an engine altogether. |
Some gray hat techniques include adding keywords on your pages at more than a reasonable level of repetition while others also try to publish their same content at different sites. But most gray hat SEO revolves around questionable link building campaigns. More...
 Don't try to get lucky...do it right and get great results:
By messing around with gray or black hat methods, you’re rolling the dice and just hoping to get lucky that you’ll rank highly and not be penalized. It’s very possible that what is deemed to be gray hat may very well change and become black hat in the near future.
If other SEOs would put more energy into devising creative and clever ways to further enhance their clients’ business models and fine-tune their marketing strategies, instead of trying to trick search engines with questionable tactics, then each party involved would benefit - the business, the customer, and the SEO firm.
Well, that's a flyover of the SEO landscape and now we turn to what you can control - your business model. Let’s chat about the Six Keys to a Viable Business Model and see how this will pay dividends for your business and help you properly structure and optimize your website. More...
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