Search Engine Optimization or simply known as SEO is one of the most popular type of Internet marketing used in the market today. According to several consultants, including those from SEO Philippines companies, the reason why SEO became popular in the market is that most of its techniques usually doesn't require too much investment, which is normally the case for SEM or search engine marketing (which deals with paid inclusion).
Another factor for its popularity in the Internet marketing industry is the diversity of its techniques. Because it deals with un-paid or "natural" inclusion, several techniques have been formulated, tested, and utilized throughout its course. While many of its techniques are considered legal, some are considered as illegal or unethical.
Like most Internet marketing techniques, SEO is also known for its techniques that causes adverse effects to search engines. Techniques used in SEO are separated in two different categories. The first one deals with techniques which are recommended by search engines while the other tends to manipulate search engine result pages or SERPs through deception. These techniques are called the white hat SEO and the black hat SEO.
Techniques in SEO: White Hat and Black Hat
The terms white hat and black hat were derived from early western cowboy movies in which the good guys wear white hats while the bad guys tend to wear black hats. Although the terms are now associated with SEO, the terms are also widely used in the online community for other purposes.
White hat hackers, also known as ethical hackers, or white knights, are computer security experts, who specialize in penetration testing, and other testing methodologies, to ensure that a company's information systems are secure. On the other hand, Black Hat Hackers (also called "crackers"), are hackers who specialize in unauthorized penetration. They may use computers to attack systems for profit, for fun, or for political motivations or as a part of a social cause.
The use of white hats and black hats were introduced in SEO as a way to denote a technique if its ethical or not. Black hat SEO tactics such as spamdexing, attempt to redirect search results to particular target pages in a fashion that is against the search engines' terms of service, whereas white hat methods are generally approved by the search engines.
According to many SEO Philippines consultants, black hat SEO tends to produce faster results than the white hat techniques. The advantage of white hat SEO is that it tends to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently discover what they are doing.
White hat and Black hat SEO Techniques
There really isn't any list of white hat SEO techniques, other than the idea of its techniques. If the technique is used not for deception, and ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see, then this is considered as a white hat. However, if the techniques are used for deceiving or manipulating the SERPs, then this is called a black hat SEO.
Unlike white hat SEO, there have been numerous techniques involved in black hat SEO. Some are still used today by many web masters and SEO specialists, while some have lost its effectiveness when search engines changed their algorithm. Here are some of the most widely recognized techniques in black hat SEO:
Keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing is a black hat SEO technique that involves placement of keywords within a page to raise the keyword count, variety, and density of the page. There are several techniques involved in this. One is through the use of meta tags. Meta tag stuffing involves repeating keywords in the Meta tags, and using meta keywords that are unrelated to the site's content. This technique, however, has been ineffective since 2005.
Article spinning
One of the most widely use form of black hat SEO today is article spinning. This technique is similar to duplicate content, however, this works by rewriting existing articles, or parts of articles, and replacing elements to avoid being penalized in the Search Engine Results pages for using duplicate content. This type of black hat SEO is also a form of copyright infringements if the original article was used without the copyright owner's permission.
Link farms
Link farms in one of oldest forms of link spam which involve any group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other site in the group. Although it was designed to allow individual websites to selectively exchange links with other relevant websites, it was used by unscrupulous webmasters who joined the services to receive inbound links and then found ways to hide their outbound links or to avoid posting any links on their sites at all. Search engines countered the link farm movement by identifying specific attributes associated with link farm pages and filtering those pages from indexing and search results.
Comment spam
One of the most widely used form of black hat SEO today is the comment spam. This involves the use of world-writable pages such as blogs, wikis, guestbooks, and many other publicly accessible online discussion boards. This can be problematic because agents can be written that automatically randomly select a user edited web page, such as a Wikipedia article, and add spamming links.
According to many SEO Philippines consultants, this technique have been prevented by using the "nofollow" tag which reduces the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.
Visit
http://www.myoptimind.com for more info.