What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and what is White and Gray Hat SEO?
Search engine optimization or SEO is a method of improving the rank or visibility of a website or web page in search engines. Webmasters employ SEO because of the theory that the more often a site appears on the first page of a search engine (whenever a user searches), the more likely it is to be visited and read by a user.
SEO is a type of search engine marketing that helps promote web presence. With this, your products and services will be in the sight of potential customers. It covers various types of searches. This includes local search, image search, video search, and others.
Business model: SEO can generate a return on investment as a result of customer interaction, but it does not pay search engines to attract organic search traffic. Organic search traffic is traffic produced by relevant search engine rankings and not alternative methods like Pay Per Click.
Changing the design of the website, both frontend and backend to optimize it, will incur costs, as well as using methods that will improve your ranking in a web search. You’ll also need a way to track these search results to make sure your website stays in at least the top 10.
Starting: Optimizing a website to improve its web presence involves a number of options:
- Edit your content and HTML as well as associated coding to increase its relevance for specific keywords
- Remove barriers to search engine indexing activities. When your website is indexed, it basically means that your website is part of the search results and you can start using your SEO strategies.
- Website promotion to increase your number of backlinks. Backlinks are inbound links to a website, which were initially a means of navigating the web, but are now more important in the business of SEO.
White Hat SEO Techniques – White hat techniques are widely accepted techniques in SEO marketing. There are services offered by search engines that ensure that a website is indexed by the major search engines. Google and Yahoo! they use web crawlers to find pages for their search results.
Some search engines, notably Yahoo!, guarantee web crawling for a fee or cost-per-click account, although this ensures inclusion in the database but not a specific ranking within search results.
Other Google services include Google Webmaster Tools, which ensures that all pages are found using an XML sitemap feed.
There are other methods used for SEO, such as cross linking. Crosslinks increase the links to the main page of the website using its available pages. There is also keyword stuffing, which includes keyword rich text on the web page that matches all search queries. When I say keyword stuffing, I do NOT mean that you should make your content look unnatural and put your keywords all over the place, but make sure you have your keywords 1-2% density in your text. Don’t forget to include the keywords in the title, keyword and description meta tags as well. Backlinks from a web directory or related sites can also help.
Gray hat SEO Techniques – Gray hat techniques are neither black nor white. These techniques are called gray because they carry risks. An example is buying links.
Google is against the sale or purchase of a backlink, but there are many online sites, magazines, and other resources that offer backlinks for a fee. Basically, the price of a text link depends on the authority of the linking page. An example of an unofficial benchmark of the average price of a text link is Google’s PageRank.
I strongly advise you DO NOT use Black Hat SEO techniques. I’m not even allowed to post them in this article on EzineArticles. You may make a short-term profit, but sooner or later the search engines will figure out what you’re doing. You start racking up negative points, and at a certain threshold, your site will be “blacklisted” by search engines, where it may never be published again; meaning you lose a small part of your rankings or may even get banned (not indexed) by search engines
Even what is considered gray hat SEO today may become black hat SEO in the future. So, if you’re serious about your online business, make sure you’re establishing it on a solid “white SEO” foundation.
SEO mistakes – The problem with this business model is that search engines periodically change their algorithms. There is also no guarantee that referrals will continue. Because of this, if you rely solely on SEO techniques, you can suffer huge losses if there is suddenly no organic search traffic coming your way.
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