subject: What Colour Is Your Seo Hat? [print this page] No, Im not referring to the colour of your baseball cap while you are working on Search Engine Optimisation but to the commonly used phrases, White hat SEO and Black Hat SEO.
Both the hats are ways of optimising articles and content on your website but the question is, which side of the fence are you on?
Black Hat techniques are a bit cloak and dagger, stuffing the text with keywords and backlinks. It is designed for the Search Engine crawlers to pick up the keywords and push your site to the top of their SERP. If a human reads the text it will make little sense and have no real direction or meaning. However, to the crawlers on the search engines it will pick up on the keyword content and backlinks. You may well think that this is a great idea and will soon get you to the top of the Search Engine Research Page but the Search Engines recognise this as spam. This way of optimising your website is short lived and potentially damaging.
It is a practice that the Search Engines dont like because it damages their credibility and usefulness.
On the opposing side of this is White Hat SEO. As the name implies, this is an ethical way of using Search Engine Optimisation. White hat SEOwill contain all the essential ingredients of optimisation, keywords used in phrases, quality backlinks and reciprocal backlinks. The key difference is that White Hat is legible, constructive text that is interesting to read by people rather than just by Search Engine crawlers. This is the sort of text that the Search Engines actively encourage and want to push forward. It has longevity and will not damage your website. Indeed, it can have the opposite effect adding fullness and roundness to your subject. Sharing your enthusiasm and know how on the web is what has made it what it is today, a never ending well of knowledge.
Of course, there are those who teter in between the two Gray Hat SEO. Hoping to obtain results whilst dipping in to the dark side but doing enough to keep it clean.
This is a dangerous game to play, especially as the Search Engines keep their algorithms secret. Who is to know when a little bit of Black Hat is a little bit too much.
So, What Colour is Your SEO Hat is a genuine question and one that we must keep asking ourselves. We must know just how ethical we want to be and whether we want to take the risk of using the more unethical techniques. Do we want the Search Engines to be our friend or our enemy? Do we want to work towards the good of all or just look out for ourselves short term?
