You may have heard the terms white hat and black hat SEO. These two practices could not be further apart in their techniques. White hat refers to good methods for improving a website’s SEO. This is done through rich, well-written content, a robust site, and a design that appeals to visitors. Black hat SEO refers to employing deceptive practices solely to improve a website’s search engine rankings. This can be repeating keywords throughout a page in a nonsensical fashion or disguising the keywords with the background so that this isn’t obvious to a visitor. These tactics are known as keyword stuffing.
As you can imagine, search engines frown upon deceptive SEO practices known as black hat SEO. If a website is found to employ these methods, it risks being banned from the search engine altogether.
The Dangers of Black Hat SEO Practices
Black hat SEO focuses a website’s efforts solely on the search engines with little to no regard for the human audience. Some of the most common techniques in black hat SEO include keyword stuffing, hidden text, and hidden links, with little regard for the user’s experience when visiting the website. This is often focused on short-term goals, generating traffic to a website with little regard to the visitor’s experience once they have arrived. This type of focus, designed solely to manipulate the website’s standings in the search results, is frowned upon by Google and other search engines
Search engines focus on returning the best results to ensure a favorable user experience. When delivering websites that have little regard for the visitor, with their sole focus on search results, you can imagine what that experience will be like. When these practices are discovered by search engines, the website may be banned from the search engine entirely, depending on the severity of the offense.
Focus Efforts on White Hat SEO
White hat SEO is considered the ethical and honorable approach to search engine optimization. Websites practicing white hat techniques focus on a healthy balance of search engine optimization, while also ensuring that the visitor’s experience is a positive one. This means developing content that is well-written and speaks to your target market, while still being rich with keywords that will be most pertinent to the search engines. Other white hat SEO techniques include quality links to other sites and content that is relevant to your audience, with a focus on the human experience.
Over the years, many websites have fallen for the quick promise of black hat SEO, paying the price in the user experience and in their relationship with the top search engines. It is best to keep your search engine optimization practices as an extension of your website, rather than the sole focus. This way, visitors to your site will continue to feel engaged by the content and design that speaks to this human audience.
