Black Hat vs. White Hat

It may sound like the Mad Magazine cartoon “Spy vs. Spy” but black hat and white hat SEO is much more serious (although this could be argued since one of the spies was always blown up, squished or impaled on the last panel.)

White hat SEO techniques are approved by search engines and will produce long lasting results. This is because they help the search engine algorithms determine the information that is on your site and your site’s usefulness to searchers. White hat techniques include optimizing content, keywords and coding to make sure the search engines can easily tell what your site is about. Promoting your site to encourage back linking also gives the search engines information about your site that is useful in determining its content and relevance to a search.

Black hat techniques are the sneaky, questionable tactics used by many companies, particularly those which promise to put you on the first page of results quickly. They might work, although less likely to these days as the search engines have put algorithms in place to discount and even penalize sites for using them. If there are results, they are short lived as the search engines will detect them and downgrade a ranking. Black hat techniques are more numerous and include keyword stuffing (putting many, many keywords on a page and in the page code), hidden or cloaked text, links from “link farms” (sites which exist solely for back links) and others.

So, don’t fall for a quick results sales pitch. It won’t be money well spent and can hurt your rankings in the long run. Web Rocket Solutions, a New Jersey search engine optimization company, provides SEO that is ethical with long lasting results. Using both on and off page SEO and by monitoring website visitor statistics, they can get your site the visitors you need.