When doing an SEO campaign there are many methods and techniques SEO experts employ. These techniques will fall within “white hat” (approved of by search engines) and “black hat” methods (not approved by search engines). Black hat methods are techniques employed to trick the search engines and to gain fast results or ranking. These results however, are short-lived and can often get your site banned from the search engines.

White Hat vs Black Hat SEO

White hat SEO strategies follow ethical business practices and are approved of by search engines. They build trust and respect in your business. You’re developing a brand online, and by developing valuable and relevant content for visitors and prospective customers, you will improve your ranking and credibility with both people and search engines overtime. True web marketing takes a lot of time and work – by people, not automated tools or fast and quick “fixes” promised by many unscrupulous SEO firms you’ll find online.

Black hat SEO techniques are commonly employed by unethical SEO companies. They are designed to get you fast results – and get the SEO company fast and easy money. They usually promise you results in 30-60 days (because that is possible when using these techniques). But they are not around to take responsibility when your site is banned from search engines, or when your site disappears in the ranking a few weeks after your SEO campaign ends. These black hat SEO companies make big and bold claims, with vague lists of techniques they will use to “SEO” your site. One of these is by stating they will create 1000 or more “links” to your site every month.

If you want to know if these are legitimate “links”, ask your SEO company to show you the links they are producing (they often will state that they can’t do this, that it’s “proprietary information”). What are they doing then? They are either not doing anything at all, or they are paying a low wage worker in Asia to deliver hundreds of comments to blogs with a link to your site (spamming). The comments are typical one or two line, “I like your site” type of comments. Once those comments are identified by the receiver as spam, or denied, or the blog post gets archived, your link disappears.

While producing 1000 links fast may sound great and just might increase your website rank fast — you run the risk of being identified by search engines as a site that is generating spam. And these techniques are very short-lived. You can’t maintain ranking in search engines using these types of tactics. By the time your site has disappeared from the rankings, your SEO company has also disappeared. Or, they’ll tell you to sign up for a new contract (pay them again). They’ll employ the same techniques until your site is eventually discovered by search engines as using black hat techniques. Search engines are continually improving their algorithms so they can identify websites that attempt to trick them, and they ban or penalize those sites. Once banned, you’ll most likely have to abandon that domain name and start over.

Stay away from SEO companies that offer:

1. automated tools
2. hundreds of submissions to search engines
3. hundreds or thousands of “back links” to your site within a short period of time
4. a promise of a high ranking for your main keywords
5. a low cost or “fast” SEO campaign (30-60 days)

Good SEO strategies are employed over a longer period of time.
The best SEO techniques to use, which will help you achieve long –lasted results, include:

1. building a properly structured website
2. providing good and relevant information on your website
3. increasing the size of your site by building pages with content and internal and external links
4. writing and posting articles and blogs on your site
5. submitting your articles to article directories
6. engaging in social media
7. gaining strong and relevant back links to your site
8. employing consistent marketing strategies
9. getting your business listed in online business directories
10. building up your website pages and content, write and post articles on relevant article directories, and get appropriate and relevant back links to your site.