Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) professionals distinguish between 2 types of practices:
- White Hat SEO,
- And Black Hat SEO.
So why talk about black and white hats?
Actually, it comes from the era of black-and-white movies in Hollywood. To distinguish them, the good cowboys always wore white hats, and the bad guys wore black ones.
In digital marketing, white hats respect the recommendations of Google (and other search engines). On the contrary, black hats exploit weaknesses in search engine algorithms.
Only one thing is certain: organic search engine techniques are constantly evolving according to the incessant updates of search engine algorithms.
So, some people play cops and robbers.
In order to generate immediate results, “Black Hat SEO” techniques exploit the flaws of these algorithms.
But this is not without risk.
Indeed, you can suffer a sudden drop in your position in Google when the next update of the search engine algorithms corrects one of the flaws you have exploited.
In these conditions, understanding the differences between these 2 SEO approaches can prevent you from making fatal mistakes in your ranking.
What is White Hat SEO?
According to Marketing Definitions, a “White Hat SEO” practice is an organic search engine optimization technique that is considered compliant and ethical by search engines and SEO professionals. (source)
In concrete terms, put yourself in Google’s shoes.
Its objective is to provide the most complete and correct answer possible when we launch a query on its search engine.
Indeed, if its answers are not good, Internet users will look for another way than Google to ask their questions.
Moreover, even if SEO algorithms are very advanced today, they are still perfect.
This is why, in their quest for quality, search engines are constantly updating their algorithms to provide us with even more relevant, legitimate, and reliable results.
Black Hat SEO specialists find workarounds to take advantage of the weaknesses of the algorithms. However, once these weaknesses are identified by Google or Bing, the algorithms are updated.
It’s cat and mouse!
To avoid being “caught”, respect the rules of organic search engines.
Obviously, this requires more time and effort, but it always pays off in the long run.
And to comply with the mission of Google, the techniques of “White Hat SEO” all aim to generate organic traffic without trickery, through high-quality content that responds perfectly to the request of the user.
What are the techniques of White Hat SEO?
Here are 4 ways to practice “White Hat SEO”.
1. Get quality inbound links
A website that refers to your content by inserting a link that points to it is a guarantee of quality. Indeed, he found it so interesting that he highlights it to his audience.
This is why search engines consider these backlinks as a “vote of confidence”.
Google specifies that these backlinks must be acquired naturally. In other words, the volume of obtaining these backlinks must be without peak and the sites that insert them must have relevant content to yours. Check our article on how to find websites that are willing to link to your content
2. Publish quality and unique content
If your content is of quality, it will necessarily provide the answer to the question of the Internet user. Conversely, poor content provides a partial answer.
There is no precise definition of “quality” or “poor”. In fact, it depends on the content that is present on the pages that are displayed along with yours.
That’s why start by analyzing the content that appears on the first page on Google and try to make your content even more relevant.
Be careful, your content must also be unique. It is out of the question to copy and paste, even partially, the contents of competing pages.
Note: don’t hesitate to regularly identify your poor content to improve them in order to get a better position. Check out this article on how to write quality content that ranks first on google
3. Use high-potential keywords without stuffing them in your pages
One practice is to find keywords with high potential.
These are queries that have a significant monthly search volume and for which the difficulty of reaching the first page is feasible.
Use a tool like Ubersuggest for example which gives you this information as well as a list of related keyword ideas.
Then, to facilitate the understanding of your content by Google, place the keyword (or key phrase) sparingly in strategic places in your content, such as the title, and alt text of images,…
Technically, all these strategic places are in fact HTML tags that search engines can easily find. For example, if the title contains the key phrase “White Hat SEO”, it is a priori, the content talks about this technique of SEO on the Internet.
Realated: 10 Ways To Write Good Title Tags That Get Clicks On Search Engines
Make sure that the keyword, chosen for your content, is present in these tags.
Here again, you can use a tool like Yoast on WordPress which serves as a checklist to verify that this work of On-Page SEO is well done.
Note: make sure your text is understandable by a human being. This way, you avoid the keyword-stuffing syndrome.
4. Provide your site with a clear architecture
The architecture of a website represents the organization of all the contents present on it.
In fact, it’s a bit like a supermarket, there are shelves and the products are arranged by categories.
Your content must be organized in such a way that a human being can easily find it.
For example, on #Wallace Walley Digitals, our content is organized according to the digital marketing levers: SEO, Email Marketing…
Finally, the internal links between your content must also be “natural”. Most often, they point to articles of the same category or even the same sub-sub categories.
All this helps Internet users in their quest to understand what you have to offer. This is why it is important that the architecture is as simple as possible and that Google takes this component into account.
In addition, good architecture also helps search engine robots to explore your website.
To guide you, Google provides some general guidelines to help them find, index, and rank your company’s website. The same goes for Bing which also provides a set of guidelines.
What are the best practices for moving up in the search results page rankings?
Have a content strategy
Whether it’s an article for your company blog, content to be published on a third-party site, or a post on social networks, always set a goal and set up tracking tools to measure it.
Search for the best keywords
Investing in keywords that are relevant to your business, but with little or no search volume is not going to affect the ranking of your content.
Similarly, investing in keywords with high search volume but already used by your competitors is a losing proposition.
The key is to identify keywords that people are searching for, but don’t have much competition yet.
Carefully write descriptive tags with your keywords in them
The Yoast plugin for WordPress is surely one of the best tools to do this easily.
Improve the navigation of your site
The rule is the following. Ideally, any page of your website should be within 2 or 3 clicks of your home page.
Also, remember to add links to other pages on your company’s website whenever relevant.
And if you want to fine-tune your internal linkage, take inspiration from the semantic cocoon method.
Related post: On-page SEO: 11 Techniques To Boost Your Rankings
Although these techniques take time and effort, they are obviously the only practices that should be favored.
They are the only ones that ensure a good reputation for your domain name in the long term.
There is no risk that your website will be penalized by a future update of Google’s algorithms.
In this way, old content can still rise in Google’s rankings and generate traffic to win new customers.
What is Black Hat SEO?
According to Marketing Definitions, a practice known as “Black Hat SEO” is an organic search engine optimization technique considered questionable, unethical, and/or punishable by search engines.
Black Hat SEO” includes schemes designed solely for the machines and their algorithms without thinking about the readers.
To me, it’s “cheating” to get results quickly.
The use of “Black Hat SEO” techniques is often very effective to get very high traffic in a limited time.
However, by using these techniques, your site can be penalized. Or, in some cases, it can be totally de-indexed from Google’s results during the next algorithm update.
This approach always results in pages that are undesirable to users, ruining your chances of creating something lasting.
Related Post: Off-page SEO: 5 Tips To Gain Quality Backlinks
Some Black Hat SEO techniques to avoid
- Publish duplicate content or suck in content from other sites,
- Automating the publication of content that has no value to users,
- Creating thousands of links using software to create a multitude of low-quality backlinks in a very short time,
- Discrediting a competitor by falsely reporting him as a user of “Black Hat” techniques. It’s the watering can!
- Set up satellite pages. A satellite page is a page created specifically to “seduce” the algorithms of search engines and especially the one used by Google. They play the role of a fetcher with keywords to redirect to another unrelated site,
- Include in your pages invisible text (hidden by an image or the same color as the background),
- Use scripts that display different content, depending on whether the visitor is a Google robot or a human being. This technique is called “cloaking”!
- Use robot programs like some “Black Hat” SEOs to spam forums or insert comments on blogs.
Also found in Black Hat, Negative SEO. This practice consists in using unethical or even worse illegal techniques to sabotage the SEO ranking of a competitor’s site in search engines.
In short, Black Hat SEO takes advantage of the “weakness” of search engine algorithms. By exploiting their flaws, the results obtained are often surprising.
But, because there is always a but, every flaw is intended to be filled. You may then be penalized at the next algorithm update.
What about the Grey Hat SEO in all this?
Between the White hat SEO and Black hat SEO, you will find the methods of “Grey Hat SEO” …
The Grey Hat SEO methods include ..:
- Buying expired domain names,
- Link exchanges,
- Show a network of sites (PBN) …
With Grey Hat SEO, people still have a good experience with your content. But there is still a level of risk of being downgraded one day by search engine algorithms.
Conclusion on “White Hat SEO” versus “Black Hat SEO
To summarize, SEO is a race to reach the top of the first page of Google results.
This is how search engine optimization (SEO) was born.
These methods and guidelines aim to improve the visibility of a website or webpage in search engines.
But you can take different routes.
Some Digital Marketing experts use a few “tricks” to position their company’s website well.
This is called “Black Hat” SEO and its goal is to manipulate search engine results.
Conversely, “White Hat” SEO follows the guidelines required by search engines.
As a company, I recommend that you distance yourself from these questionable practices.
It’s playing with fire! Do you really want to take such a risk to stand out from your competition?
I don’t think so.
On the other hand, since you are not fighting against Google, but against your competitors, learn how to legally spy on them to outrank them on Google.
Have you used any Black Hat SEO techniques? What do you think about Grey Hat SEO?
