White Hat SEO vs Black Hat SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a digital marketing strategy that helps any website or piece of content to rank higher on search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. As we all know, the basic difference between SEO and paid advertising is that SEO involves organic techniques to rank higher on SERPs but what people don’t know is that there are two types of SEO strategies present in the market.

Before we learn what SEO is and why it is important, it is pivotal to understand the primary difference between the two SEO strategies, i.e., White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO.

What is Black Hat SEO Strategy?

Black hat SEO refers to a set of practices and techniques that are used to increase a website or page’s rank in search engines through means that violate the search engine’s terms of service or rules. When it comes to SEO, going for rapid profits and gains is often referred to as “black hat SEO”. There are lots of sneaky techniques that come under the black hat SEO strategy like repeating content, keyword stuffing, and link scraping to rank quickly. Let’s take a closer look at such black hat SEO techniques:

  1. Duplicate Content: When a business tries to rank for a certain keyword, they might try to duplicate or copy the same content in their text again and again. Google penalises the sites that do such a thing.
  2. Invisible Text: Earlier what people used to do was add tons of keywords at the bottom of the website’s text and make it the same colour as the background. Today, using this strategy might get you blacklisted very quickly.
  3. Cloaking and Redirecting: Buying up a bunch of keyword-rich domains and directing all the traffic to a single site is the wrong way of cloaking and redirecting.
  4. Publishing Irrelevant Content: Posting bad quality content that provides no value to customers reflects poorly on the business. Years back, copying content and data from other websites was not quite detected by the search engines which help the websites rank higher without any penalty. But today due to strict search engine algorithms and policies, the sites with copied content are instantly ranked down.

Outcomes of black hat SEO can bring about your site being prohibited from search engines and de-ordered as a punishment for utilising unethical methods.

What is a White Hat SEO Strategy?

White Hat SEO refers to the use of optimisation SEO tactics and strategies that target more on the human audience as exposed to the search engine and absolutely follow search engines rules and procedures. Along with maintaining the integrity of the website, it also improves the search performance of the business on SERPs.

To give you a more concrete idea of what means, here are some white hat SEO techniques:

  1. Relevant & Quality Content: Content written for the benefit of the users and not the search engines is the most critical element of modern-day SEO. Always remember the quality of your website content is the best way to rank higher on search engines.
  2. Keyword-rich page title and metadata: Nowadays, web pages with keyword-rich content, titles and metadata have become necessary. It is often overlooked by businesses but optimising in this area can deliver fruitful results.
  3. Standard inbound links: Gaining authoritative inbound links takes a lot of time and dedication but has a huge impact on how you rank in SERPs. It also helps in increasing overall site traffic.
  4. Proper Website Code: A lean code and semantically structured markup language consisting of rich keyword heading elements on your pages aid search engines like Google in finding what they are looking for when crawling your site.

Businesses that use white hat SEO expect to make a long-term investment on their website, as the results remain for a prolonged time.

Conclusion

SEO strategy can either give you successful results or be a barrier to your success, therefore, choosing the right strategy is extremely pivotal. As you uncover ways to optimise your site, the black hat vs. white hat SEO debate is one you may come across often. Remember to always opt for a white hat SEO strategy without any second doubts as it adheres to all search engine guidelines and keeps you far away from getting penalised and banned. 

Additionally, the white hat SEO strategy creates a positive impact on the search engines and is focused on the human audience. Although, investing in a white hat strategy is a bit time consuming but your business will be much more successful in the long term — without having to worry about algorithm updates or possible penalties.