The term white hat, black hat or grey hat can be use synonymously within the IT industry. It can mean methods used to hack while also denote Search Engine Opimisation methods that help you gain a better overall ranking in the search engine ranking page(SERPS). However, today we will be talking about what white hat or black hat marketing is in the website optimisation realm.

What are white Hats or black hat techniques?

Black hat marketing or white hat marketing refers to techniques and tools utilized by different websites to give them an edge in the search engine rankings. This can be in a form of software to help automatic difficult and arduous tasks. The term “black hat” refers to techniques used to manipulate existing search engine algorithms to give your website an edge. While they can give a substantial boost, it can be easily patched by the search engines, making you lose your overall rankings or even get blacklisted. White hat SEO on the other hand refers to legitimate methods recommended according to Google web guidelines to optimise your website. To find out more about exist white hat and black hat methods, read on.

Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO is notorious for giving undeserving websites with good ranking because of methods they used to manipulate the search engine algorithms. in the early 2000s till about 2010, this was extremely rampant due to the many loopholes in the system. This included methods such as keyword stuffing at the footer of websites in order to rank for that particular keyword or to adding spam links from websites. Below are more of such examples:

• article spinning
• link farms
• keyword stuffing
• hidden links
• content automation
• cloaking
• link purchase

Why You Should Avoid Black Hat Techniques

Although black hat techniques can often be extremely effective in a short term, there are usually not long lasting and tends to give you negative results in a long run. Google has been efficient in patching these loopholes up with updates with code names such as Panda, Penguin, hummingbird to penalise such websites.

If you are building your corporate site or intend to monetize your website, black hat should be avoided at all costs.

White Hat SEO

White hat on the other hand refers to following Google’s web guidelines when optimising your website. White hat techniques hopes to promote better engagement with visitors and improve their browsing experience. Its the best long term approach and definitely can be used on all types of websites. By following such techniques, you will reap good ranking results without free of being penalised whenever there is an algorithm update.

Some of the techniques though not conclusive includes the following:

• Speed optimisation across your website
• clean site architechture
• building relevant and helpful content
• social media influences
  • facebook pages, instagram posts and twitter updates to name a few
• proper meta tags
  • page title, description tags
  • proper Alt title for pictures

Ending Note

Although the list of recommendations is not exhaustive, it is important to implement as many as possible. If you are not confident of making such changes to your website, hiring someone to do your search engine optimisation may be the best option for you. To find out more, do click here.