Ethical SEO
These day’s it seems that getting on the first page of google is the holy grail of webmasters!
The difference in traffic, both quantity and quality between being on the first two pages of Google and being on say page 55 is huge.
This has meant that a whole industry has been built up around SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), with the aim of getting websites to the top of Google for their ‘search terms’ and thus achieving a huge increase in traffic.
The SEO industry is split into 2 main groups these day’s – white hat SEO (or Ethical SEO) and Black Hat SEO, with a cross over being called ‘Grey Hat SEO)
What are the differences?
Quite a lot of webmasters probably don’t even know the answer to this! – That is the reason for this article. Making an informed decision on what type of SEO to undertake is very important.
White Hat SEO
This is also called ‘Ethical SEO’. White hat SEO experts say that they don’t really try to trick Google into ranking a site higher, instead they tend to focus more on building good quality content on a site that people will want to link to.
These day’s a lot of white hat SEO specialists do actually build links also, but they are more selective and do not do such things as spamming peoples blogs comments for backlinks.
Black Hat SEO
Black hat SEO is the sort of ‘any means necessary’ of the SEO world. This can bring amazing results as black hat SEO attempts to ‘trick’ the google algorithm by employing techniques such as cloaking, gateway pages and keyword stuffing. Although Black hat SEO can be effective and bring in huge traffic, it can also get a site banned very quickly, so the effects can be very short lived. For this reason, we seriously would not recommend employing any black hat techniques in your SEO work.
Grey Hat SEO.
As the name would imply, this is a bit of a grey area. We feel that commenting on high PR blogs to gain backlinks, but actually leaving good, on topic and informative comments comes under the ‘grey hat’ SEO banner.
It is always worth remembering however that the mighty Google does not actually want you to try to raise your websites ranking yourself… IT wants to decide. So be careful out there folks! – Don’t offend the mighty G!!! (If in doubt, then hire a SEO specialist)
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