SEO 101: White Hat vs Black Hat SEO

Tech Tips + Tricks, Technology
White Hat vs Black Hat SEO

Nowadays you can find almost everything on the website, from cooking recipes, places, or even a company profile. Everyone on the web is competing for a top place in Search Engines like Google. To improve websites rank and appear on top of the first page, you need to understand Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

For starters, SEO is a process to improve the quality and quantity of website traffic, visibility as well as exposure to your brand through non-paid or organic results. This means we need to understand what people are searching online, the words they are using, and the content they looking for. To better understand this, let’s take a look at how SEO works.

How Search Engines Work?

Google, Bing, Yahoo, and many other Search Engines use bots to scour over billions of content on the web. This step is called “Crawling”. After that, the bots evaluate thousands of factors and put them in an index, that’s why it is called “Indexing”. And then ordering them by how well it matches the query in a process we refer to as “Rankings”.

There is a lot of factors in SEO success, one of them is content relevance. This means the bots estimate how well a web page can give the searcher what they’re searching for.

There is a set of rules to set up an SEO strategy and make the most of it. to make SEO strategy better, it involve many trials and error and it is a long process. However, some people would rather take a shortcuts and violate the SEO rules.

White Hat vs Black Hat SEO

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, taking a shortcuts or quick gains is referred as a “Black Hat SEO”. People using this tactics may have a lot of traffics in short-time. But after a while, Google is aware of this and end up penalizing and blacklisting the site to make sure that website is never ranks again.

Some of Black Hat SEO practice is including:

  1. Using Invisible text and Keyword Stuffing
  2. Duplicate Content
  3. Cloaking
  4. Links to site with non-relevant content
  5. Paid Links
  6. Spam Comments

There are many more ways to Black Hat practice and it is always evolving. But the Search Engines like Google is using algorithm and it is always updating from time to time. The reason is to prevent a website using this method and make Organics ranking more relevant to the searchers.

On the other hand, White Hat SEO is a practice to increase website ranks without braking the rules. This include following the steps and guidethat is provided and acceptable. Some of this practice including :

  1. Make Relevant Content
  2. Image with Alt-text
  3. Using good grammar and complete sentence
  4. Make the website faster and easier to navigate
  5. Using meta-tags description

Not all best practice is mentioned above, but there are many ways in improving website ranks in organic search. It just takes a little bit of time, create many relevant and high quality content, and most importantly always test the SEO strategy.

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