Do You Wear A White Hat Or Black Hat?

When someone mentions the phrase "Organic SEO", they mean the optimization of a website to appear in the non-paid, search algorithm driven results in search engines. However, it is useful to understand that there are two "clans" for organic SEO experts, and these two clans use very different strategies in getting results.

The first clan is called white hat SEO, the other one is called the black hat!

Here are the differences between the strategies used by the two clans.

Quality Content versus Exploiting Algorithm Loopholes

White hat SEO experts build quality content. As the adage goes "Content is King" on the Internet. Quality content is the best bait for targeted incoming links - people who find your article informative and interesting will recommend you by putting a link on their site.

The Black hats SEO clan, instead, constantly looks for technical loopholes in the search engine algorithms to "game" the search engines, such as cloaking sites, nasty redirects, keyword stuffing and many others. When the search engines algorithms are reviewed, these site are very often kicked out of the index, but these black hat SEO experts simply get though this by searching for another loophole.

Attracting Links versus Participation in Linking Schemes

As we all know the number of incoming links to a particular website is one of the key factors that determine the success of the website. When you have more incoming links, it would mean to the search engine that you "have been recommended" by more people, so naturally you should appear higher in the search listings.

However, again the two clans use different strategies to get their incoming links. The white hat SEO experts often looks at a website and ask themselves "How do I get people to link to want to link to this site willingly?" The eventual result can be the using the best link bait as mentioned above - using quality content, or more applying a more creative strategy by providing a viral service that people would want to recommend to friends.

The black hats, on the other hand, simply thinks of "How do I get links to the site?" They pay no consideration to whether the links provide value to the visitors and readers. The eventual strategy that emerges usually turns out to be schemes like link farms and reciprocal link schemes.

Learning about the search algorithms to follow them versus learning about the algorithms to exploit them

Both clans of SEO expert do a massive amount of research, except that they do their research for different purposes. Search engine algorithms change frequently, and research is done to learn about the changes in algorithms - which strategies work, and which doesn't.

The white hat SEO clan uses this way of thinking - "How can I use the algorithm to help me rank well?" The black hat SEO clan thinks using - "How do I bypass this meddlesome algorithm and rank well?"

Again, because the search engine algorithms change very frequently, the black hat clan will find their rankings to drop once the algorithms change to cover the loophole. White hat SEO techniques will often stay high in rankings.

So, are you wearing white hat or a black hat? Will your rankings continue to stay where they were if you stopped optimizing it daily, or will it drop drastically?

Tan Kian Ann is an advocate and mentor for creating sustainable home based eMarketing businesses. To claim your free eCourse worth $147 on how to get create a sustainable eMarketing business, and live the "money rolling in while you sleep" lifestyle, check out Kian Ann's eMarketing Lifestyle project