SEO: Black Hat vs. White Hat Techniques
Over the past few years, it’s become widely recognised that search engine optimisations has two sides to it. As with life in general, it has the healthy, decent and fair way of doing things, however rumbling under the surface is the dark, bad, and plain naughty way of going about it. In case you were unaware, this is where the terms “White Hat” and “Black Hat” SEO originated.
We’ve spoken about it a few times before, but SEO has changed. Thanks to Google’s algorithm updates, some of the dirty old tactics that used to work before are well and truly dead. Parallax, and hopefully most other digital agencies out there, are firm believers in the white hat techniques. It’s all about creating engaging, relevant content and using keywords effectively throughout.
Whilst black hat techniques may have some sort of positive short-term effect, the ramifications can be devastating to websites and businesses. Using black hat techniques can cause your website to be penalised by the search engines. If this happens, it’s incredibly difficult to make your way back.
Let’s take a look at some of the common black hat techniques that you need to avoid, and the white hat techniques that you should be using.
The Black Hat Techniques To Avoid
1. Link Farms
Are these still a thing? Who cares, do not use them. Their purpose is to list unrelated links of websites in an attempt to gather more traffic. In reality, nobody visits these websites and nobody clicks on the links. Participating in link farms will more than likely result in your website being banned from Google. Avoid them!
2. Hidden Content
This is bad, very bad indeed. There are many different places to hide it, but stuffing keywords into the code of the site will get you in trouble. For example, within comment tags, <noscript> tags, and don’t forget the lovely camouflaged text option. Using CSS to make the text the same colour as the background, or ridiculously small is all very much frowned upon. If any digital agency recommends this to you, turn them down.
3. Meta Description Abuse
Meta descriptions should simply describe what content is on the page, summarised in a few short sentences.
This is how it should be done properly – “Parallax work with some of the most exciting local, national and global brands. Talk to us, we make the web work.”
Make sure you don’t do anything like this – “Parallax is a digital marketing agency. We’re the best at digital marketing, we can help improve your digital marketing, use digital marketing to improve your business.”
4. Doorway and Gateway Pages
Probably one of the most annoying things about dirty old school SEO. These pages are designed specifically for search engines rather than general users, and are pretty much fake pages stuffed with pointless content that’s optimised for various keywords. Users don’t often see these pages as they tend to get automatically redirected to where they need to go. When the search engines crawl a page such as this, they’ll probably define it as spam and ban the website. Don’t go there.
The White Hat Techniques That YOU SHOULD Be Using
1. Great Quality Content
You’ve heard it millions of times, but it’s true, content is king. The best way to optimise your website in this day and age is by offering unique, well written, high quality content. Think good product descriptions, engaging articles, and informative updates. It may take longer to see the results, but it’ll help you out big style in the long run.
2. Use Your Keywords Effectively
Websites still need to be created with keywords and key search phrases at the forefront. Make sure you’ve done a keyword analysis that details all of the relevant search terms and begin to place them within your content naturally.
Single words are now longer the most effective way to target search engines and are often far too competitive. Try and be a bit more specific, e.g. digital marketing leeds. Try to use around 2-3 keywords per page and within important elements including the title, meta description, h1, h2, h3 tags, and the rest.
3. Worthwhile Inbound Links
We’ve mentioned above how link farms are incredibly bad. Getting good links from high quality, highly authoritative websites, that are contextually relevant to your website is great. These websites are usually considered in the highest regard from search engines and can have an impressive effect on your overall rankings.
Try using something like Moz’s Open Site Explorer to look at the domain authority of a website. It’s over 40, it’s going to be popular with the search engines.
4. Separate Content From Design
Although this may seem obvious, it’s important to structure your website in the correct way and ensure that the search engines can read it properly. Use heading elements and CSS to separate design elements from content. Remember, search engines can’t read images, so having the content coded separately will save you a lot of pain.
Do It Properly
If you’re investing the time and budget into an SEO strategy, make sure you’re aware of what’s happening and what’s going on behind the scenes. Don’t get punished by the search engines for using dirty tactics, those times are behind us now. Make sure you have an understanding of the keywords that you want to target and use them in the correct way. Keep creating unique, relevant content and you’re website will naturally climb the search engine rankings.
Parallax is a digital agency that avoids the black hat techniques like the plague. If you want to chat about an SEO strategy, or look at creating awesome content, just give us a shout. We’d love to hear from you.