What is Black Hat & White hat SEO? Techniques of SEO
Full Stack Developer
SEO, short for search engine optimization, involves optimizing a website to rank higher in search engine results on platforms like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. It helps search engines understand your content, enabling users to find the most relevant information.
There are two types of SEO:
Black Hat SEO
White Hat SEO
What is White Hat SEO?
White Hat SEO is the ethical approach to SEO, also known as organic SEO. It involves optimizing a website by following the rules and guidelines set by search engines.
Techniques used in White Hat SEO
In White Hat SEO, the focus is on the human audience, providing the most relevant content according to their queries. Here are some techniques we can use:
Content Optimization: Write content in a well-structured and optimized manner, incorporating appropriate keywords.
Quality Content: Ensure the content is of high quality, offering value to the reader with clear and understandable language.
Relevant Internal Links: Add relevant internal links to facilitate easy navigation from one page to another, ensuring the linked pages are related.
High-Quality Backlinks: Obtain backlinks from reputable websites. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the higher your website is likely to rank in search results.
Sitemaps: Create a sitemap to provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and their relationships. This helps search engines crawl the website more efficiently.
Better UX: Ensure the website has an intuitive UI, is easy to navigate, and offers good performance and overall user experience.
Overall, White Hat SEO focuses on providing the best user experience and high-quality content.
What is Black Hat SEO?
Black Hat SEO is an unethical approach to SEO. It involves optimizing a website using techniques that search engines disapprove of.
Techniques used in White Hat SEO ?
Here are some of the popular techniques used in Black Hat SEO:
Keyword Stuffing: This involves overloading a webpage with the same keywords. For example, if I have a webpage about SEO and I want it to rank high in search engines, I might repeatedly write the word "SEO" in every line.
Duplicate Content: Copying and pasting content from other webpages to your own is also restricted by search engines. Even if we paraphrase the duplicate content, it is still not allowed.
Cloaking: Cloaking is showing one thing to users and something different to search engine crawlers. There are different types of cloaking, such as HTML cloaking, JavaScript cloaking, and client cloaking. These practices are restricted and should be avoided.
Hidden Text/Links: This involves using a white background with text written in white color, making it invisible to users but visible to crawlers. This technique was valid before, but it has now been blacklisted due to excessive misuse.
Link Spamming: Creating a lot of random backlinks.
Link Farming: Linking to a lot of other websites on your own website.
Should we use Black Hat SEO ? Is it practical ?
We should avoid using Black Hat SEO techniques for optimizing our websites or blogs. These techniques violate the rules and regulations set by search engines, which can result in our website or blog being blacklisted. Being blacklisted means our site won't appear in search engine results, leading to a significant loss for bloggers or businesses.
Summary
White Hat SEO is the ethical and recommended approach to optimizing a website, focusing on high-quality content and user experience. Black Hat SEO, on the other hand, involves unethical practices that can lead to a website being blacklisted by search engines.
