The following is an article “White Hat and Black Hat Practices”
by Marc Primo.
Marketers face a choice when planning their digital advertising strategy, especially when it comes to generating traffic via links. Marketers must choose between white hat or black hat link building strategies to boost their content marketing campaigns.
In essence, white hat approaches a strategy that follows Google's principles -- particularly concerning unique content. Black hat tactics take a full 180, choosing a more aggressive strategy that isn't afraid to bend the rules.
Each practice has its pros and cons. This article will explain each, to help you decide whether you'll want to use a white hat or black hat.
What's Black Hat SEO?
Black hat is any practice used online to trick a search engine into ranking a link under shady pretenses. Marketers who exercise black hat SEO would be the outlaws of the internet because they rely on rule-breaking techniques to earn higher rankings.
Black hat practices.
Unrelated keywords:
Adding keywords that do not have any connection to your articles is a red flag for search engines due to how unnatural it looks. Say you're working on a site dedicated to bird migration. Including a sentence like, "Tom Cruise likes to watch birds migrate" seems like a good idea but it probably isn't true, and it has nothing to do with the way your product can benefit your intended audience. Instead, it utilizes an unrelated celebrity to bait search engines -- search engines hate this. The purpose of any search engine is to match queries with useful content and when google or any search engine becomes aware of any tricks or foul play they take action against the domain implementing the black hat trickery.
Content automation:
We can recognize a bot comment a mile away, and even though this text includes one or two keywords that help the link rank higher, it's randomly created and makes no sense to the reader; search engines pick up on this.
Doorway pages:
These are fake pages that are overloaded with keywords that make them more accessible for search engines to locate. But once clicked, they automatically redirect visitors to a separate page and are therefore meaningless. The target is to fool search engines to rank a link when it would not otherwise be.
Invisible text or links:
Another common black hat practice is to hide text or text links in your content to improve rankings.
Black hat practices are incredibly risky to execute and are often discovered sooner or later. Consequently, a site could be prohibited or penalized with a lower rank.
White hat practices.
Quality content:
Making valuable content for your target audience is what makes it share-worthy. Your content needs to be first, highly relevant to your audience and second contain no punctuation or grammar errors.
Effective keyword research:
Although keyword stuffing is frowned upon, keywords still maintain value when used correctly. Your content should display a set of related keywords and phrases, and you can identify the most effective keywords by researching keywords or phrases you think people may use to discover your niche. Long-tail keywords can be much more specific to a service or product and are more successful at ranking higher.
Relevant Backlinks:
If other sites are linking to you, it means you've got quality content and so you will reap the reward with a higher ranking. Remember, though, that there are good links and poor links, which means you want to be sure any off-site links are relevant and lead to similar high-quality content.
Internal Links:
Linking within your site is a good indicator your site has value so long as you don't overstuff them. A great rule of thumb is three or fewer hyperlinks to deep-seeded pages inside your site.
Meta Description:
Your web site's meta description is the very first couple of paragraphs that appear in the search results beneath your page name. Carefully editing and choosing the keywords in your meta description can be very useful in the long term.
Ranking higher takes work, and Google rewards Long-Term Strategies.
Even though it is going to take more time to see results, the plan focuses on improving your search performance through quality, not quantity.
If you want to know more about Marc Primo Pulisci and Digital Marketing click here.