When you’re out in the virtual world trying to give your website’s ranking a boost, there are some techniques you can use. The difference between white hat and black hat SEO falls somewhere along those lines.
Where the Difference Lies: White Hat & Black Hat SEO
There are different SEO techniques or approaches you can resort to when wanting to improve your site’s ranking. These have been classified into two categories. One is ethical and the other one not so much. One will get you long-lasting results but that might take some time, and the other one is the fast track, but it will, quite possibly, get your site banned sooner than later.
White Hat SEO
The human audience is the primary focus of white hat SEO. Readers are considered the ultimate consumers of your content and, therefore, content should be optimized to make their experience better.
Search engines still matter, but they take the back seat to real life readers. This is a long-term strategy, as the results build up over time but you’ll definitely see a tangible return on investment for doing things the right way. Creating quality content, proper use of keywords, back-linking, keyword analysis, and internal linking are some of the strategies used in white hat SEO.
Black Hat SEO
It is the unethical method to SEO. Why? Because it uses certain “aggressive” approaches that search engines don’t really approve of. Blackhat SEO doesn’t care much about the readers. It is much more interested in search engines and the techniques that can be used to get the quickest return on their website, even if it’s not a sustainable solution.
Things like blog spam, link farming, hidden text and keyword stuffing are what black hat SEO is all about. Using these techniques can result in search engines banning your site and, possibly, de-indexing it. Doesn’t sound fun, does it?
Grey Hat SEO: The “In-Between”
This one is a little riskier than white hat SEO but not as much as black hat SEO. It consists of things like purchasing followers on social media, buying old and expired domains with high rankings and then swapping out their links for links to your content, among other things. Grey hat SEO still cares about user experience, but there’s also some risk involved.
How to Get the Best SEO Results
The approach you use is ultimately up to you but beware of the benefits and consequences of all before choosing. At Impressions Agency, we keep the most ethical guidelines to SEO at heart to get you good, long-lasting results the right way, so that your brand’s integrity is never questioned. Let’s work together!