White Hat SEO
Friday, August 6th, 2010What’s good or bad about search engine optimization?
“Connotation” is defined as “the associated or secondary meaning of a word or expression in addition to its explicit or primary meaning“ and it’s a powerful rhetorical tool. Used properly, it can convey positive or negative feelings, or convey a sense of motivation. For instance, when we talk about “white hat” vs “black hat” SEO, a reader understands that this is a case of good vs. bad. But what’s good or bad about search engine optimization? In a field where there are no hard and fast rules, there are nevertheless some practices that are viewed as ethical, and others that will get a site banned from search listings.
‘White hat’ SEO relies on:
At its root, ethical SEO focuses on creating content that’s both relevant to visitors and noticed by spiders. The more content-rich a website, the more attention it will receive. Industry-relevant blog posts, FAQs, informative articles and press archives are all wonderful ways to accomplish this, and can even encourage other sites to link to yours as a knowledgeable source.
I’ve mentioned this as an important SEO tool, but there’s a right and a wrong way to go about doing it. The right way involves requesting link exchanges from other reputable websites, a time consuming process that doesn’t always end in an agreement from the opposing webmaster. Still, the more incoming links from related websites, the better your search ranking. Linking to sites that engage in poor SEO practices can negatively impact your rank, and should be avoided. Know your colleagues and competitors! It’s also important to maintain a sitemap for your own website, creating what’s called ‘internal linking’ between your own pages. The easier your site is to navigate, the easier a time search engines will have indexing it.
Again, there are no laws governing SEO, but search engines exist to supply their users with the best possible results, and they’ve developed guidelines to ensure that people find what they’re looking for. Sites that use black hat methods to climb the rankings make the search engine look disreputable. They don’t take kindly to that.
Some of those deceptive black hat techniques include:
Ever visited a site and thought a child may have written the content? Ever felt attacked by buzzwords? Keyword stuffing is a form of copywriting that focuses on including the maximum number of keywords regardless of coherency or informative ability. Sometimes SEO practitioners don’t even bother trying to make copy out of their keywords – they simply string them into a block of text at the bottom of the page.
This ploy hides nonsensical strings of keywords by changing the font color to match the background of the page. If you highlight the text on a site, you may find lines of such things that you can’t see, but search engines can.
Keyword stuffing at its worst, doorway pages are nothing more than pages filled with line after line of a specific phrase designed to draw search engine attention. While doorway pages are rarely found by human visitors, they are still considered grounds for removal from search listings.
Arguably the sneakiest technique, cloaking presents a different webpage depending on whether the visitor is human or a spider. How the cloaking program determines this varies from method to method, and search engines aren’t able to detect them all. If caught, offenders are instantly banned.
While black hat methods might result in a short-term spike in page views, they will eventually get your site banned or dropped to the bottom of the ratings. The white hat approach, while more time consuming, is more consistent and far more likely to ensure long-term success.