White Hat, Black Hat

For all of you online marketers who really want to succeed in this business, this post is definitely for you!

We’ve all heard about the White Hat and Black Hat SEO strategies, and there are even Gray Hat SEO strategies.

1. White Hat SEO is all about ethical, high integrity, and customer focused marketing strategies and promotional techniques. This is the most ethical way of ensuring SEO and it is highly valued by your customers because they are able to trust that they will find what they need on your site, as well as trust that you will provide what you say you will in terms of content and information.
2. Gray Hat SEO are those tactics that are not totally wrong but are still a little ’shady’ and sometimes a little misleading. For example, purchasing dozens of links through a link-farm rather than gaining links through the value of your website could be considered Gray Hat marketing.
3. Black Hat SEO references the bad guys. These are the online marketeres who operate with limited ethics and integrity and are only focused on gaining traffic - they are less interested in loyal customers, long-term relationships, and ethical marketing strategies. They are often “dishonest hackers”

Search engines become smarter and smarter every day and they change their algorithms and ranking systems to overcome the techniques utilized by Black Hat strategies. That’s yet another reason to stay on the straight and narrow - working ethically and hard for the ranking you receive.

Don’t succumb to Black Hat tactics in your quest for SEO. Stick with the high integrity, reputable methods of gaining page rank and attracting traffic.

• Use keywords in titles that attract your target audience and increase page rank.
• Make sure the snippet of text appearing in SERPS includes text that is compelling enough for your target audience to click further.
• Keep your content fresh and unique - you’ve heard this before but ironically, it’s worth repeating again and again!
• Have many pages of content deep within your site to increase page rank and keep visitors and customers on your site longer. Authority sites will usually have at least 100 pages of content or more.
• Make it easy for visitors and customers to find what they want. The less clicking and scrolling they have to do on a page before they discover valuable information, the better!
• Answer the questions that your site visitors have and then answer their next question before they ask it!

Focus on doing business with high integrity, ensuring high quality, unique, and valuable content and you’ll find that traffic and page rank will follow.