White hat vs black hat seo

What The Heck Is Black Hat & White Hat SEO?

You’ve probably heard the terms White Hat & Black Hat SEO thrown around before. You might have even had a few spammy emails in your inbox mentioning them, most business owners have a fairly poor grasp of what SEO even is, so why would you need to know about the specifics?

Failing to understand the difference or worse, investing in the wrong service for the wrong business could be catastrophic for your business’ online presence, resulting in the complete loss of organic growth (free traffic) for your website after being added to Google’s dreaded blacklist.

What is Blackhat SEO? ( And why you should avoid it )

Blackhat SEO is known by many terms but it was frequently used in the early years of the internet as a quick way of boosting your way up the search engines in a hurry. Google has been stamping down on these methods hard and penalising website owners HARD for using them. You might get a quick boost for using them even now but Google will likely find out and you’ll pay for it at some stage or another.

Aggressive SEO techniques that focus only on the search engines & not the human experience
Buying Backlinks
Spamming keywords in content & meta title, descriptions
Creating multiple pages for every variation of keywords – ie creative-wavelength.com/website-design-derry, creativewavelength.com/web-design-derry.

When would you use Blackhat SEO?

If you were using a ‘get rich quick’ scheme or an overnight business which you have no plans for long-term besides making some quick money with no issue if it’s later banned from search engine listings.

What is Whitehat SEO?

Whitehat SEO is the modern method of legitimately building your business up the search engine rankings.

White hat SEO in 2018 is based around

Building SEO around human audience & experience
Completely following search engine rules & policies
Creating actively engaging websites that encourage active users
Blogging/content marketing
Non-spammy use of keywords and well-structured titles throughout your content
Keyword analysis & optimisation

When should you use White SEO?

Any legitimate business should use only white hat SEO strategies for building a consistent & sustainable online presence. Google rewards businesses long term that follow their policies and any good website designer / SEO strategist will have the software tools to prove this. Growing your business SEO in 2018 and beyond will take a little more work but your users will thank you for it. Googles policies are based on great engaging content that users will naturally like and pushing old school SEO techniques out the door. Following these policies will naturally grow your brand loyalty and future consumer base so what’s not to like?