White Hat against Black Hat

White Hat and Black Hat Search Engine Optimization are very different ways of how to do SEO.  White Hats are the website designers that follow the SEO guidelines. Black Hats are the website designers that use cloaking, backdoors or other methods to optimize their sites. For example, buying or selling links (with no follow tag) is officially a black hat SEO method and it is against Google’s Guidelines.  We are firmly in the White Hat camp and we are convinced that Black Hat techniques have only a short term positive effect.  On the long term, Black Hat technique can have disastrous consequences.

The White Hat strong points are the quality content, the use of structural mark up, meta data, effective keywords use, and high quality inbound links. Black hat are using hidden content, Meta keyword stuffing, doorway pages, gateway pages, and link farming.

Let’s focus on White Hat main SEO techniques.

Quality content: when we started to consider SEO as an important entity, there was a great phrase that we are hearing continually: content is king. And this is true. There is nothing more valuable than a unique, well researched and written content.

Separate the content from the presentation: this really helps search engines to understand the meaning of the webpage. Heading elements is vital because search engines are giving more importance to the content within the heading elements. It is also vital to use CSS to separate the content from the design elements; this is the way to give easy access to search engines to find the content; this is what they are looking for.

Keywords:  find what keywords or key phrases people might use to find the site. It is better to try phrases instead of a single keyword.

Inbound links: links from a site highly rated and relevant for the content of your site.

Black Hat is using hidden content, which comes in within the code of the site, with keywords not visible for the visitors of the site.  Meta keywords stuffing are used to let know search engines about the content of the site. When used incorrectly, search engine will consider a use of spam techniques to improve the site ranking. Doorway pages are designed for search engines but not for the site visitors. These are fake pages stuffed with content and optimized for main keywords that link to a landing page.  Link farming (or free for all pages) have only one purpose: to list links of any unrelated sites. They don’t provide traffic and the site can be banned.

Our only advice: never participate in link farming, use only clean and “nice” White Hat SEO techniques.