SEO Black Hat, SEO White HatThe Internet has changed the way business is handled, and in doing so, it has also changed many of the ways businesses go about building and managing their reputations. A business's online reputation can help make or break its success. With that said, businesses are taking extreme steps to build and protect those reputations.
About Using SEO to Build a Reputation
When using SEO tactics correctly, a website or business gains the favorable attention of search engines. This helps the site move up in search rankings, which means the site will come up in searches more often. In other words, the site listing is more likely to get found when people are searching for terms related to the site. The bottom line is, SEO is designed to increase traffic to a site by the process of gaining high-ranking SERPs (search engine result pages).
SEO is "white hat" best practices. These principles should be used when working to develop and maintain a business, and also when building an online reputation.
Black Hat SEO
The label "black hat" is used to refer to inappropriate SEO strategies. Black hat SEO methods are those designed to attempt to "trick" search engines or damage other websites in some way. The use of these techniques can result in websites dropping in search engine ranks or being completely banned from a search engine. That has a detrimental effect on the business's online reputation.
The goal of black hat SEO is really the same as white hat methods -- to gain search engine juice. But not only are these techniques frowned upon, they can literally ruin a business's overall Internet reputation.
SEO Tactics to Avoid
Hidden Content: Although there are different ways to accomplish this dirty deed, some webmasters will add keywords in a white font to a white background or use black font on a black background, etc. This results in the words being invisible to site visitors, but the keywords are picked up by search engines.
Link Farming: Link building is an important part of SEO, but links should be relevant, and they should be built over time in a natural way. Joining a link farm will ensure links, but they do not help increase traffic to the site, and they are highly frowned on by search engines.
Worthless Content: The truth is soon discovered about sites that add worthless content just for the sake of building quantity and adding keywords. These sites become known as spam sites that post irrelevant content.
Things to Do Instead
The basics of SEO begin with proper keyword research and learning how and where to use those words and terms. In most cases, a short phrase is more effective than a single word.
The website itself should be user-friendly and easy to navigate. It should be designed in a way that makes it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for. Add quality content with the intent of becoming an authority site. Content should always be properly optimized.
Link-building can be a slow process, but it is necessary. Making use of natural link building methods are the best way to add reputation to your site. Internal links are also important for SEO purposes. Link related articles whenever possible.
White hat SEO techniques are best practices that can take any business to a higher level, and when practiced consistently, these methods will protect and maintain the online reputation of the business.