There’s a reason why you’ve heard that you shouldn’t choose inbound marketing or SEO forms that stress the importance of Black Hat SEO techniques. And if you haven’t heard, consider yourself informed.

For one, Black Hat SEO tactics are unethical. Secondly, most online marketers will tell you that it’s not worth the risk – because there is a huge risk involved which we’ll get into shortly.

Everyone hates web spam, don’t they?  That’s essentially what Black Hat SEO is – creating web spam – and quality inbound marketing firms won’t participate in it for that reason alone.

What is Black Hat SEO?

If you do a search for most pharmaceuticals or “made for TV” scammy-type products, you’ll get a load of results on page 1 of Google, all of which are usually just articles stuffed with content that’s been crammed full of top keywords, like “Buy (insert brand name here) or “Buy (insert brand name here)”.

Not very helpful right? Almost anyone who is even remotely ‘net-savvy will recognize that these pages are rubbish immediately and won’t go near them. Keyword stuffing and spamming is a huge part of Black Hat SEO, and all that it will do is give readers poor quality articles that offer zero value.

Black Hat SEO also uses other tactics to boost their ratings, like cloaking. Most of us have been a victim of cloaking. You type something into a search bar, such as a recipe for a natural cleaning product. In the search results, you find a link – “How to Make your own Natural All Purposes Cleaning Product”. But when you click on that ink, the page you are brought to is really just a page selling some popular name brand cleaning product. Not what you were looking for, right?

There are a ton of Black Hat SEO tactics that shady firms use which we won’t get into here. But from a user’s perspective, these tactics are just all about spam and no quality content.

The Benefits of White Hat SEO Techniques

White Hat SEO, on the other hand, does allow and even encourages businesses to create quality content for their websites. With White Hat SEO, content is king – just as it should be. Search engines are becoming increasingly intuitive and will actually seek out and place web pages with quality, easy to read content higher than pages that are keyword stuffed. Another great benefit of having non-keyword spammed content: you won’t get blocked by Google! And no web page wants to get blocked by Google.

Having pages that have proper titles and meta data also plays a huge role in White Hat SEO. While past meta data and title abuse has caused search engines to become a bit less trustworthy of this, they both are still incredibly important, if for nothing else than to tell visitors what your page is about and what content they can expect to read.

White Hat SEO is about keywords, just as Black Hat SEO is, but it’s also about effectively using those keywords rather than abusing them. Keywords and keyword phrases, which you have identified as being the most beneficial to your business, can be found peppered throughout your entire website and in all of the important elements, such as in titles, meta descriptions, <h1>, <h2>, text and links.

It’s All About Ethics

Using ethical and legitimate SEO tactics also means that you’ll get a slew of inbound links. Now this process won’t happen overnight, and actually can seemingly be painstakingly slow, but be patient.  Once you get your site up and running and start putting it out there for everyone to see, you’ll be getting a ton of great backlinks that will push you ahead in the search engines.

White Hat SEO not only allows you to use quality content to better support your presence online, but it also means that there’s no chance that Google or other search engines will block you. If you choose to go the Black Hat route however, then Google may take down your page once or twice and pardon you, but if you continuously abuse and use Black Hat SEO tactics, Google will block you for good. And if you think that Google is forgiving, you’re wrong. Google hates being duped by silly internet marketers, and they’ll make every attempt to make sure that you stay off of their search engine for good. Not such a good thing since Google is the #1 search engine (and a Google company, YouTube, is search engine #2).

Key Takeaways

Offering premium content is what will always put your website ahead for the long haul. Black Hat SEO techniques will shoot your website right up to the first page of search results far faster than White Hat SEO, but your page will also undoubtedly fall quickly and also be taken down and possibly even banned from Google forever. It’s not worth the risk.

Need Help?

If search engine optimization is something you are interested in but are having trouble getting started, contact us today to schedule your free marketing analysis.