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  • SEO Hats – Black Hat, White Hat and Grey Hat

    Posted on April 20th, 2008 Editor No comments

    Ever used lots of keywords or keyword spamming in your content to get better website rankings? Watch out! Your site could soon be banned.

    Search engine optimization or SEO is an important and crucial aspect of any online business who wants to do well. Without SEO, even your most brilliant of products and services may never reach the potential clients. If you are an SEO specialist then you must know about that large number of techniques which are used for SEO which include both ethical search engine optimization which is appreciated by search engines, and also the unnatural search engine optimization techniques that are discouraged by the search engines.

    White Hat SEO – the recommended way

    • White hat SEO refers to the SEO techniques which conform to the guidelines laid down by search engines and are considered as ethical search engine optimization techniques.
    • These include high quality and updated content, proper use of keywords and metadata, use of alt tags and descriptive file names, seo link building including internal links, and other such SEO strategies which the search engines approve of.
    • In white hat SEO, the pages are built keeping the human visitors in mind. They do not try to deceive humans or the search engines.
    • Implementing these natural search engine optimization techniques may take a little time and effort, but their results last a longer time and you don’t have to worry about having your site banned by google or yahoo for use of deceptive practices.

    Black Hat SEO – the other way

    • Black hat SEO on the other hand refers to all the unethical search engine optimization techniques which the search engines discourage.
    • These consist of keyword stuffing, hidden text, meta tag stuffing, doorway pages, hidden links, using link farms, cloaking, and other such search engine optimization techniques.
    • The pages in black hat SEO are built not for humans but for the search engine spiders. They are designed to get better rankings fast on major search engines.
    • The flip side is that they run the risk of being banned by the search engines once they are found out. Search engine majors like Google, Yahoo, and MSN believe that pages should be built for humans and provide them the information and data they are looking for. By using Black hat SEO techniques you build pages for the spiders and in turn give your visitors a bad experience.

    Choosing between the two

    What SEO tactic you choose is entirely upon you. While white hat SEO will take you time and efforts, it will give long lasting results. On the other hand, black hat SEO will probably give you much faster results, maybe even getting you in the top slot, but runs the risk of getting your site banned from the search engines. Standing in the middle, or using a mix of the two, can prove beneficial only if the amount of black hat SEO tactics incorporated in your search engine optimization strategy is the minimum basic.

    As you increase your black hat tactics more, you increase your chances of being banned. On the other hand, using a few tactics to get quick results till your white hat SEO tactics start showing results may be okay if you are sure to remove the black hat techniques soon. But if you can, it would be best to avoid all the black hat techniques and stick to ethical search engine optimization. It would give you good results that last longer.

    Needless to say, an ethical seo company will follow only white hat methods and you can blindly rely upon them with their organic seo services to keep your websites up on grounds of ethical search engine optimization.

    Popularity: 1% [?]

  • Where does blogging stand in Search Engine Optimization

    Posted on April 20th, 2008 Editor No comments

    It can be said that SEO and blogging almost go hand in hand. Blogs in their basic design have a lot of right things to offer to the search engines which gets them high rankings.

    Search engine optimization or SEO refers to all the techniques employed to get better search engine rankings and thus increase the traffic to one’s site. There are a lot of SEO tactics being used these days to get better and better results. These SEO techniques range from advanced link building to fresh content, from metadata to keyword research, from forum posting to blog commenting.

    A blog, abbreviation of weblog, is a frequently updated, personal site maintaining an ongoing chronicle of information. It can be focused on one particular subject, or speak about a variety of topics. The blog is mainly focused on the content, and the design is of not that high an importance, unlike a website, which relies on its content and design to attract visitors.

    Blogs have a variety of advantages over the traditional websites when it comes to search engine optimization. Thus blogging plays a very important role in an effective as well as affordable search engine optimization. Let’s take a look at its various benefits:

    Structured Content

    • The content is often divided into various themes by many of the blog software present on the internet.
    • By categorizing the content, it becomes easier for the search engines to understand the content of your blog, and thus your chances of better rankings in those categories increase.

    Search Engine friendly URLs

    The URLs used in blogs are often simple and straightforward. This makes it easy for the spiders to locate and crawl your blog’s content.

    Link Building

    There is a lot of interlinking in blogs. With fresh content in the form of text, audio, and video, blogs usually attract a lot of incoming links as resources of information.

    Updated Content

    Content which is regularly updated is always preferred, not just by search engines, but also human readers. This means frequent repeat visits from humans, and better crawling of your pages by search engines which result in better rankings.

    Internal Links

    If your blog is about a service or product, you can easily deep link anchor to information pages or purchase webpages inside the website. This proves to be very effective for better search engine results on long keyword phrases.

    Benefit of RSS

    Linking to RSS feed with the blog domain name is another good SEO technique. It helps build the website link popularity building when the content is cited by other blogs.

    Active and Interactive

    The whole design of a blog allows for easy and quick comments and feedback from visitors. If you have good content on your site, then visitors would more often than not publicize your site on other blogs, forums, and websites.

    Comments as links

    Posting a comment on someone else’s blog is also a great way to build links for your blog. Every time you leave a comment, make sure you include a link back to your blog in it.

    Thus, blogging is a very good SEO strategy to use to get the best out of your natural search engine optimization efforts. It is designed so as to complement search engine optimization and is quick and simple to implement. So with blogging you are sure to get good results and fast.

    Popularity: 2% [?]