The Difference Between White Hat and Black Hat SEO

When someone steps into the online business world with the attempt to make money free they will need to learn SEO. The problem is when a webmaster tries to rank their website high the easy way is to use spam tactics which are in the realm of black hat seo. Things like link farms, building tons of blogs full of links, placing ads where they don’t belong, and hiding both links and tags internally all fall into the category of black hat seo. On the other hand working really hard creating masterful content and actually taking the time to seek out and build promotional relationships may be much harder, but the pay off for using these white hat techniques will be much more beneficial. If you are confused about the difference between black hat and white hat seo it is pretty simple. Black hat seo is using unethical techniques to rank well in Google whether it be spam or tricky link building. White hat seo is using both external links as well as internal content and keywords to rank well. Google is in a constant battle attempting to destroy black hat seo so even if you do acquire top ranking with these unethical techniques more than likely after a few weeks or months your website will be targeted and dropped from the SERPs (search engine results page).

I will not go in at length about black hat seo because I do not want to inspire poor internet marketers, but I will explain some of the white hat seo basics. First and foremost when you build and market a presence never let seo affect readability, the visual look, or the authority of a web page. If you find yourself questioning whether words or links should be added more than likely your website can do without them. You should also understand that seo is in a constant state of change and you should be keeping up with top sources such as matt cutts (Google him), seomoz.com, and seobook.com. These will keep you constantly updated on new seo techniques.

SEO is using onsite and offsite techniques to rank in the appropriate place within major search engines such as Google. The offsite techniques include link building, content marketing, and branding. The onsite techniques include internal link structure, keyword optimization, HTML, and meta tags. The internal link structure should be very clear and rather than have words within your anchor tags such as “home” and “page 1” you should have keywords you would like that page to rank well for. When I say keyword optimization this covers quite a bit. You should be concerned with the keywords in your content as well as the keywords in your title. The keywords in both should reflect your website fully and you should be using keywords that are popular (have a decent amount of monthly search volume). The HTML and meta tags are more for webmasters rather than bloggers. Your meta tags should be unique for each page that is suitable for a landing page and you should be aware of your HTML tags such as the headings and bold text. If you have questions about anything covered within this article feel free to ask at my internet marketing forum.