SEO Best Practices – WhiteHattin’
Posted on 09. Jun, 2009 by in SEO
I’ve spent my entire SEO career practicing White Hat SEO often being outranked by some competitor using Black Hat. This can be incredibly frustrating but there are things you can do about it. As mentioned in an earlier post, I’d like to elaborate on the fundamental best practices for a solid White Hat SEO campaign. First, lets get to know the hats:
- White Hat - Everything done with on page / off page SEO is above board, following Search engine guildelines to a T.
- Grey Hat – Walking the thin line of ethical search engine optimization. an example of Grey hat SEO would be stuffing or spamming key phrases in your post, meta tags, pages etc, saturating your content with potentially none relevant phrases in the hope of becoming more relevant than a competitor site purley based on the number of times said keyphrase appears within your content.
- Black Hat – Completely breaking the rules, going against the guidelines set forth from the search engines. An example of Black Hat SEO is hidden text. The art of making the font text color the same as the page background color.
If you have a Google account within webmasters tools there is a “report” link where you can let Google know of offending sites. Here is a list of things you absolutely cannot do to try and artificially increase your ranking within the search engines:
- Hide text content using CSS, java, or HTML. The search engines can and do spot this, the penalties for employing this technique range from de-indexing of your site to complete removal and IP ban.
- Buy Text links. Most SEO’s know the key to successful performance specifically within Google is the amount of quality, relevant back links pointing to your site. Though a back link campaign can be tedious at times, don’t be tempted to purchace text links from anywhere. They are detected, they are reported by competitors, they are incredibly easy to spot and the devalue your websites credibility almost instantly within the search engines.
- Spam or Stuff keywords into your content, meta tags or anywhere else on your website. Write your content for humans, include the keyphrase you are targeting in well written paragraphs and you will be rewarded in the long run.
- Duplicate Content. Sometimes putting aside time to crank out blog posts or website content can be very difficult, especially for Realtors. Don’t be tempted to copy and paste some content from another’s website. It will be instantly devalued and can also damage the sources site credibility. Taking quotes and sourcing them with a back link is absolutely fine, Copy and pasting an entire Wikipedia entry isn’t.
Obviously theres hundreds of ways to try and dupe the search engines, this lists just a few. The best piece of advise I can give you is to use common sense. If it does’nt feel right, just don’t do it the risk vs reward do not balance out with Black hat SEO.