Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Learning the Differences Between White Hat and Black Hat SEO Techniques

There are two distinct ways by which you can employ Search Engine Optimization method to boost up the rankings of your website or affiliate site. The experts loosely call the terms White Hat and Black Hat SEO simply to distinguished between accepted and approved SEO best practices, and those that are implemented to achieve results but are not exactly honest methods.
There are big-named companies who tried to black hat their way into the top of Search Engine rankings, but they have been caught and reprimanded accordingly. Imagine having your sites suspended from Search Engine listings for quite a few days, the damage caused to their company’s corporate image, not to mention website revenue, was more than enough to make them sit up and take notice.
Black hat SEO methods involve the use devious techniques such as using hidden text that either by using background-colored text, text inside an invisible div, or text which is placed strategically off the screen. Another black hat method which has alerted search engines is bringing people to a different page rather than the one they requested – this scheme or SEO ranking ploy has become known as cloaking.
But perhaps the most rampant black hat method used by less than honest SEO people, is spamdexing.. Spamdexing could involve any one of a number of methods that can include excessively repeating unrelated or meaningless phrases for the sole purpose of manipulating the relevancy or prominence of keywords indexed by the search engines.

Some people try to convince their clients that spamdexing is a normal part and accepted practice in search engine optimization, but this is not quite true. Most search engines nowadays do check for incidences of spamdexing, and will not think twice about removing the pages of possible violators from the search engine indexes. Moreover, employees of top search engines such as Google and Yahoo have the authority to immediately block the results-listing even of entire websites which are suspected to be employing spamdexing techniques.

White hat SEO, on the other hand, tend to make use of time-tested methods which may be slow to produce ranking results in the beginning, but do yield long-lasting and much sought-after results in the end. Unlike black hat methods, white hat techniques can make you rest easy – you can sleep soundly at night without fear that your site will be blocked or suspended because of unacceptable practices.
White hat SEO techniques are adjusted to conform to the search engines' guidelines, they are straight forward and up front with their tactics. What do we mean by this? As you may already know, search engines employ different and varying algorithms to determine the relevancy ranking of websites.

Some effective white hat methods are using appropriate keyword descriptions for the title and Meta tags, as well as relevant linking within and outside the website pages. Another important method for search engine optimization is to use alt text tags in all of the images.
Simply put, white hat SEO techniques do not end with merely following guidelines to ensure top search engine rankings, but also but is more about ensuring that the web site content is accessible and friendly for users, not just for search engines,

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