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What is the difference between White Hat and Black Hat SEO?
Here's your answer!
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Its objective is to make your website more visible on search engines, like Google. This will help create more traffic and ultimately give you more sales. SEO is done by optimizing aspects of your website and outreach to rank higher in searches. By ranking higher on Google, you rise above your competition. Unlike pay-per-click advertising (PPC), you don’t have to pay for each click. Instead, it uses organic search, meaning simple Google searches. Google is by far the biggest search engine! So while SEO works on all search engines, we will be referring to Google in this article.
What is White Hat SEO?
White Hat SEO means playing by Google’s rules. It uses best practices and follows Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. The strategy here is great user experience and long-term growth. Yes, it can be much slower, but as you will see, it’s 100% worth it!
High quality content creation
Content should always be valuable and relevant to whatever someone is searching on Google. It must meet user needs! Content is not only the foundation of Google, but the Internet. By creating high-quality content, you are appeasing the Gods of Google!
Keyword optimization
Keywords are whatever someone is searching on Google. They should always appear naturally in content, to ensure readability. Keyword stuffing means repeating keywords over and over in hopes that it will help Google rank you higher. While this may have worked long ago, it is now considered bad practice! Google will actually rank you lower if you keyword stuff on your website!
On-Page SEO
Everything on your website should be optimized for SEO. This means optimizing titles, meta tags, headers and images with relevant and natural keywords. This is how Google finds your website! Everything should be easy to read for human readers.
Mobile-friendly design
These days, almost everyone uses a phone to access the Internet. By making your website mobile-friendly, you create a seamless experience. Google really favors websites that work on any device!
Ethical backlinking
What are backlinks? A backlink is whenever another website links to your website. If you have backlinks from reputable websites, Google will rank you higher. But, can you just buy backlinks? Not if you want to play by Google’s rules! Paid backlinks can ultimately hurt your rankings and your business.
Instead, for White Hat SEO, backlinks should be created naturally. You should create great content and share it with others. One method is to “guest post”. A guest post is when you create an awesome blog post for another website, and ask them to link back to you. Google really likes backlinks that are created this way!
Technical SEO
Your website needs to be as fast as possible. If it’s too slow, visitors will leave and you’ll have a high bounce rate. Google tracks all of this, and favors web pages that keep people engaged.
Benefits
White Hate SEO strategies create long term growth! Yes, they can be slower than cheating the system, but ultimately, it’s more prosperous and advantageous for your business. By playing by Google’s rules, you are never at risk of severe penalties.
What is Black Hat SEO?
Black Hat SEO is done by attempting to cheat the system. It uses manipulative and deceptive tactics to get results fast. This is very risky! Google can enforce severe penalties or even black list you from their search engine.
Keyword stuffing
As previously stated, keywords are phrases on your website that people search for on Google. For example “pizza in Chicago” or “best affordable dentist” are both keywords. They are the foundation of search engines (like Google) and SEO (search engine optimization).
As mentioned as well, a long time ago, the more keywords you had on your page, the better. This made websites seem unnatural and difficult to read. People would just spam the same keyword over and over to get higher on Google. It was a bad attempt to cheat the system!
This no longer works, and it’s called “keyword stuffing”. Google is smart enough to detect this and will enforce severe penalties if you do it. Instead, your keywords should always feel like a natural conversation.
Cloaking
Cloaking is when you have two different versions of a website: one for search engines, and one for humans. It tricks search engines into thinking your content is something else. In cloaking, keywords are repeated for search engines, but aren’t visible to people. Cloaking is against Google’s policies and it will hurt your business.
Hidden text and links
Hidden text and links are invisible to people, but seen by search engines like Google. It uses keyword stuffing, so that unnatural keywords are repeated over and over. Of course, repeated keywords seem awkward and confusing to read, so some people try to hide them with invisible text and links. This is a poor attempt at manipulation and is quickly found by Google. Justice is then served!
Link farms and paid links
As mentioned above, a backlink is when another website links to your website. If the linking website is relevant and authoritative enough, Google loves this!
However, backlinks should always be created naturally by sharing great content. Paying people for links is against Google’s terms. It can have severe repercussions and even get you blacklisted!
Duplicate content and spamming
Google is strictly against plagiarism. Always create content yourself, and if you refer to someone else’s content, always cite your sources!
Automated content can seem amazing and fast, but it’s usually low quality. Google can detect the quality of your content and will penalize you if it’s garbage!
Risks
Black Hat techniques are usually done to get faster results. However, they usually lead to severe search engine penalties. Yes, your website will drop in ranking eventually, and you can even be blacklisted altogether. It really isn’t worth it! It’s like taking steroids versus natural bodybuilding. Yes, it seems great to make fast gains, but natural wins in the long run!
Main difference.
White Hat SEO means playing by search engine rules (like Google). Although it grows your business at a slower rate, it is much more sustainable. It creates a snowball effect and pays you over time.
Black Hat SEO tries to manipulate and cheat the system for fast results. It can result in penalties or even blacklisting. Ultimately, you should always use White Hat SEO strategies! Then you can sleep easy at night knowing Google won’t trash your business!
