White Hat Vs. Black Hat SEO

Think back to just about any movie you’ve ever watched. What color did the good guy wear? What about the bad guy? Well, search engine optimization (SEO) tactics follow the same kind of wardrobe cues as the villains and heroes from countless movies. The good guys wear white, and the bad guys wear black. Here’s the difference between white hat and black hat SEO.

What Is White Hat SEO?

White hat SEO is the good guy. It’s tactics that follow Google’s best practices for SEO and are generally more user focused. There’s never any deception or “shady” tricks to get the website to the top.

Here are just a few white hat SEO tactics to boost your online visibility:

Creating relevant content
Complete, well-written sentences
Relevant and unique page titles
Well-labeled images
Relevant links
Standards-compliant HTML

Search engines want to provide a good user experience. If you design your website’s layout and content to support the user experience, search engines will reward you with higher rankings. That’s the basis of all white hat SEO.

What Is Black Hat SEO?

Black hat SEO is the bad guy. It’s SEO tactics designed to deceive and trick search engines while completely disregarding user experience.

The most common (and annoying) black hat SEO tactic is keyword stuffing. How many online articles have you clicked through that are basically unreadable because the author was so obsessed with ranking for keywords that they forgot to write complete, coherent sentences?

Keyword stuffing isn’t the only black hat SEO tactic around. Google has a list of SEO tricks to avoid if you actually want to rank organically:

Automatically generated content
Participating in link schemes
Creating pages with little or no original content
Cloaking
Sneaky redirects
Hidden text or links
Doorway pages
Scraped content
Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value
Loading pages with irrelevant keywords
Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware
Abusing rich snippets markup
Sending automated queries to Google

While these black hat methods might seem like the “get rich quick” scheme of SEO, they fall flat in the long run. The easy way out is rarely the best choice.

Why Does the Color of Your Hat Matter?

Sticking with the movie metaphor, black hat SEO isn’t the best tactic because, well, the bad guy never wins.

Google and other search engines are fully aware of every black hat SEO tactic, and they work hard to decrease any website’s rankings achieved though unsavory methods. Simply put, search engines want the best for their users. Black hat SEO tactics aren’t user focused, so search engines try to eliminate such sites from the rankings.

If you want your website to hit the top of the search engine results page (SERP), white hat SEO is the best way to go. Take your time to create quality, informative, and valuable website content that’s focused on the user. That’s the best way to the top in today’s digital world.

Work With a White Hat SEO Expert

There are plenty of SEO agencies and freelancers out there, but they don’t all play by the same rules. Many choose to use black hat SEO tactics because they’re quicker to implement and show fast results. Once the client sees the “results” and pays the invoice, the SEO agency moves on, while the client gets to watch as all the SEO work they paid for unravel.

Whenever you’re looking for an SEO agency or freelancer, make sure they use only Google-approved white hat SEO tactics. It’s the only way to ensure authentic and long-term ranking results.

If you’re ready to boost your website’s online rankings, contact me today. I’ve been working with SEO for over a decade, learning how to implement proven white hat SEO tactics to get your business noticed. Let’s build your website with authentic SEO tactics designed to get you the attention you deserve.