The term white hat originates from old western movies where the good guys wore the white hats and the bad guys wore the black hats. Today the term white hat SEO refers to ethical search engine optimisation techniques and black hat SEO refers to unethical approaches.
White hat SEO follows the guidelines set down by the search engines themselves such as naturally linking to others sites and not buying links which the search engines don’t like. If a link to another website has to be bought it’s not a true vote for that website, as it has been placed there only for financial gain and not because the link would be of genuine interest to the websites visitors.
White Hat SEO is the opposite of Black Hat SEO. Generally, search marketers who practice White Hat SEO (or ethical organic search marketing) techniques try to improve their organic rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs), while maintaining the integrity of their website and following Google’s steadfast set of rules.
SEO has come under great scrutiny by the public, mainly because of the increased unethical manipulation of this technique. And for this reason, there exist the terms White Hat and Black Hat SEO. Black Hat SEO is simply SEO techniques used to trick search engines immorally. White Hat SEO, on the other hand, concentrates on using ethical techniques to improve a particular website in the hope of being able to rank higher in search engine page results.
White Hat SEO is the only way to go if you are trying to market your website and generate traffic, while avoiding being penalized by search engines for unethical techniques. The core of the White Hat SEO approach is honesty and quality content. With a concentration on simplifying the structure of your website, ensuring that all software and programming is simple and clear for search engines to crawl your website, search engines will be more willing to rank your website higher for your optimized keywords or search terms.
There are one basic advantage and disadvantage of white hat SEO. You don’t risk penalization but it needs quite a long time to succeed. On the other hand black hat SEO can speed up the process.
With good SEO strategies you can expect a lot of visitors which will come to your website and earn you good money. To get the highest conversions your site should load as quickly as possible because your visitors will leave it if they will need to wait too long. Good uptime is also very important.
In the extreme, you could throw together a load of keywords and backlinks and they need not even make sense. This could be very effective short term but the crawlers used by the search engines are cleverer than that! These little spiders catch on very quickly to text like this and disregard it as spam and render the text ineffective. Black Hat SEO is very risky and short term and not ethical.
In between White hat SEO and Black Hat SEO is Gray Hat SEO which, as you can probably guess is a bit of both. Essentially it is less risky than Black Hat SEO but not as ethical as White Hat SEO.
Of course, the search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing prefer White Hat SEO as it brings credibility to its site. The search engines are only useful if we, the user, can find what we are looking for without having to sift through a load of spammy text. I bet there are loads of you out there who have changed your e mail account because of the unacceptable level of spam you receive. Just like e mail accounts have filters, the search engines filter out unwanted spam so Black Hat SEO gets found out very quickly.
Read about Directory submissions also read Search engine submissions and Get one way links.
