Search Engine Optimisation - Black Hat SEO Strategies

If you are even moderately familiar with SEO, you have most likely heard the terms black hat and white hat regarding search engine optimisation techniques. These are used to describe the strategies web designers and business owners use to attract traffic to their online content.

Black hat, as you might have guessed, is the "bad guy" way to try to attract visitors, and although some people have had some measure of success with a few black hat strategies, the search engine algorithms are updated all the time to reflect their disfavor of these techniques.

Some black hat strategies include:

* keyword stuffing - overuse of keywords in attempts to rank higher for them in the search engines
* hidden or invisible text in the page content - text is added in the content in a color that matches the site background so search engines "see" it but site visitors do not; typically the text consists of excessive keywords
* doorway pages - these are intended to trick the engines into giving a site a higher rank; spiders can see the pages, but site visitors cannot

Other black hat strategies include 301 redirects, link cloaking, duplicate content, link farms, false news releases, blog comment spam, misleading headlines, and invisible links.

Disadvantages of Black Hat Strategies

* Surfers find it very irritating to type in a specific keyword or search phrase and get directed to pages of content or other links that have absolutely nothing to do with what they are seeking and provide basically useless content.
* Search engines are smart and growing smarter every day; eventually they'll spot the black hat content and eliminate it from the search results. At one time, the slap on the wrist was a decrease in page rank; it is becoming increasingly more the case of websites being banned and permanently eliminated from search engine results.
* How a business markets themselves has a lot to do with how they are viewed by potential customers; using black hat strategies to try and "fool" prospects is not a very positive brand builder. Actually it is a huge turn off to the majority of people.

There is also a middle of the road technique that falls somewhere between white and black hat techniques known as "grey" hat marketing. Site developers and owners who implement grey strategies don't take as great a risk as the black hatters, but they do stray away from the white hat methods by breaking a few rules here and there such as using a higher keyword density than normal but not so high as to get flagged for black hat keyword stuffing.

Site owners using gray hat methods might escape having their sites banned, but even so, if caught by the search engine spiders there are usually associated penalties such as decreased page rank.

The black and grey hat strategies most always only work temporarily anyway, if at all, so the best search engine optimisation plan is simply to start out using white hat strategies and stay with them. It builds trust between your business and the search engines, and a favorable business reputation with the internet surfing public. Hire an SEO consultant so you ensure you say on the right side of the line