What is the colour of your SEO hat?

Organic search engine optimisation means the results of optimisation efforts done to get a website to appear in the search engine results pages. This type of optimisation is non-paid advertising and the results are driven by the search engine algorithm. Now it is a well-known fact that there are two completely opposite teams when it comes to SEO; the black hat optimisers and the white hat optimisers and the twain shall never meet. Both teams of optimisers have as goal the highest possible place in the SERPs; the methods used are simply completely different.

Sniffing out loopholes

White hat tactics means building content of high quality that gives the greatest value to website visitors. This result in content that is the perfect link bait; the quality and relevance of your content encourages other website owners to link with your website. This is the best and only ethical way to build links.

The black hat team on the other hand is constantly sniffing out the smallest technical loopholes that might appear in the search engine algorithms. This is called “gaming” the search engines.

Every time the search engines review their algorithms, the sites guilty of trying to game the system gets booted. Black hat optimisers are tenacious though, they just go looking for other loopholes.

Link scheming

Everyone knows that incoming links are vitally important for the success of a website. Relevant and valuable links show the search engines how popular your website is and each incoming link is in reality a recommendation for your website. This is one of the factors that go into determining your website ranking position. For white hat SEO building links means getting quality links willingly from other websites.

The black hat team is not interested in all of this. Black hat optimisers go out from the viewpoint of how can to get links, irrespective of where I get them from or if they are relevant or even have any value. Black hat tactics are only interested in the number of links to be grabbed. This means they go in for link farming and also for what is known as links schemes where reciprocal linking is done with no care to the value or relevance.

Compliance versus exploitation

Search engine algorithms change regularly so both teams of optimisers actually do a huge amount of research to keep up with the changes. The white hats do so to learn how the algorithms work so that they can adjust their strategies accordingly to push those that work and change those that no longer work.

The black hats simply see the algorithm as a meddlesome barrier that tries to stand in the way of high ranking. So they spend their time researching ways to undermine and bypass the algorithm.

All of this result in the white hat optimised websites continuously having good ranking while the black hat websites drop like a stone with each algorithm change. That is if those websites have not already been penalised by the search engines and/or banned.

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 10:47 am and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.