“White hat” and “black hat” are terms applied to people with noble or malicious goals, respectively. For example, on the internet, someone who scams innocent people out of money is using a black hat strategy, and a person who uses their knowledge of computer security to shore up a system’s defenses is performing a white hat service.
In the world of search engine optimization (SEO), there are some techniques that are commonly viewed as white hat, while others are considered black hat. In your digital marketing practices, you want to always stand firmly in the realm of white hat SEO.
In order to do that, you’ll need to have a good understanding of both.
Understanding White Hat SEO
White hat SEO is focused on the user. It’s focused on giving potential customers a good experience and not trying to cheat the system in any way. It’s an ethical marketing strategy.
It Values Quality in Its Content
The purpose of any search engine is to give its users top-quality content quickly and easily. As such, users hope that the top-ranked searches will be the ones of the highest relevance and caliber. When you use white hat SEO, your try to appear highly ranked by delivering just that: the best information on the best-designed and optimized site.
While the goal of any SEO is to get clicks, white hat methods prioritize the experience of the person using the site. By creating high-quality content and services, it aims to end up on top by being exceptional.
It Is Rules-Compliant
Search engines like Google have an obligation to their users to operate ethically. It’s in their best interests to cultivate a trustworthy relationship, so they need to ensure the pages they’re indexing and offering to their users are also acting with ethics in mind. To do this, search engines enforce strict codes of conduct for any site that might want to end up in their searches. A good example of this is Google’s best practices.
Any techniques that might be considered malicious or manipulative are off-limits under these guidelines. A site that uses white hat SEO holds itself to these high standards, optimizing pages in a way that is compliant with the rules set forth.
It Puts Faith in the Long Term
While both white hat and black hat SEO aim to pull in new users, white hat techniques are much more focused on playing the long game. Instead of utilizing less-than-scrupulous methods to harvest a huge number of clicks quickly, as with black hat SEO, white hat SEO is about building a brand and reputation.
It takes a while to develop SEO that is both compliant and high quality, but the white hat philosophy trusts that creating user-focused content will generate a wealth of dedicated users over time. It might be a bigger investment of time and energy, but by adopting it, you’ll organically grow and maintain your key audience.
Understanding Black Hat SEO
Black hat SEO is used to get as many people on a site as possible through any means necessary. It manipulates algorithms to cloak sites in a façade of quality and relevance, pulling users away from more relevant and better-made sites.
It Only Values Clicks
While white hat strategies are utilized to give users the best experience possible, black hat tactics just drive users to the site. This is done by employing deceptive measures that trick search engines like Google into ranking them higher, getting more unsuspecting users to click through. Black hat SEO users might stuff keywords into a site in a way that is invisible to potential customers but appears to the search engine crawlers that catalog and index sites. To the system, it appears to be highly relevant, but in reality, it doesn’t deliver anything it promises.
Another black hat trick is creating a web of links to other sites, giving the false appearance that it’s frequently cited and linked to, and therefore has an authority on the subject in question. The quality of the site itself is irrelevant; the only thing that matters is getting a click.
It Does Not Comply With the Rules
As you could probably guess, black hat techniques are frowned upon by search engine guidelines. Black hat SEO skirts the rules, trying to outsmart moderation efforts to pull in as many users as quickly as possible.
In the long run, this is never a good plan of action. Even if someone manages to find a new way to manipulate a search algorithm and gets away with it for a while, it’s only a matter of time before they’re caught. They may have gained a bundle of users, but that’s cold comfort when you find yourself blacklisted by Google.
It Forsakes Long-Term Users for Short-Term Gains
Those who use white hat SEO invest the time to build and retain an audience through the quality and trust they demonstrate, but black hat SEO purveyors only care about tricking users onto a site. It takes time to build a good marketing strategy and consumer trust, but it doesn’t take much time to deceive people into clicking a link. It can be tempting to go for the get-rich-quick scheme, but it puts you at risk of losing your ranking entirely. While black hat SEO might seem more effective in the short run, any gains it provides quickly vanish into nothing.
Where You Should Want to Be
For SEO, the only good choice is white-hat SEO. It can seem tedious to put the time and effort into legitimately earning a higher search ranking, especially for a small business just starting to build a web presence, but in the long run, it’s the only viable option. Operating within the search guidelines will guarantee that your gains will be lasting ones.
If you’d like a hand employing white hat SEO strategies for your business, reach out and get some digital marketing advice from the team at InnoVision Marketing Group. That way, you can grow your business while keeping the white hat firmly in place.