What is the Difference Between Black Hat and White Hat SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation is an essential part of online marketing. It can often mean the difference between the success or failure of any business. Therefore, marketing individuals and businesses are constantly seeking new strategies to achieve their desired results as swiftly as possible. This can raise the issue of which hat to wear, the black hat or the white hat.
Black hat and white hat SEO are two opposing marketing tactics. They are both used to gain higher rankings on search engine result pages. For decades, SEOs have been grouped into two camps – the ‘black hats’ and the ‘white hats’. There are premeditated differences behind what we often think of as white and black hat SEO, and those differences are important for you to understand if you work in the world of marketing. So, what exactly are the differences between white hat and black hat SEO techniques?

Black Hat SEO Techniques

Black Hat SEO refers to the use of aggressive and unlawful SEO strategies and practices. Black Hat techniques only focus on search engine results and not the human audience. Therefore, these techniques are more commonly used by individuals and businesses looking for a quick financial return on their website, rather than a long-term investment. Basically, black hat users want successful results with minimal effort. Below are some of the most common Black Hat SEO techniques that some marketers employ to boost their success.

Link Farms:

A link farm is a form of spamming the index of a search engine. It usually looks like a regular page, but most of the content are hyperlinks which are often random and completely unrelated to other websites.

Keyword Stuffing:

Keyword stuffing is the practice of forcing as many SEO keywords onto a page as physically possible. It is widely considered to be an unethical search engine optimisation technique.

Blog Spam:

Blog spam is achieved by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs or other online discussion boards. Comment spam leaves a negative impression on visitors to your website, telling them that nobody is actively taking care of it.

Scraping:

Scraping is taking content from other places and publishing it on your site. It is plagiarism and this behaviour is against the Google guidelines.

Doorway Pages:

Doorway pages are web pages that are created with the purpose of sending visitors to a different page. They are a form of spam and are not easy to identify as they have been primarily designed for search engines, not for humans. They are also known as bridge pages, portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages and entry pages.

Parasite hosting:

Parasite hosting is the process of hosting a website on someone else’s server without their consent. It can also refer to hosting a Web page on someone else’s server without the latter’s permission and then reaping the benefits. As the name implies, this is a black hat technique because it is often used for spamming links.

White Hat SEO Techniques

White hat SEO techniques are basically tactics that are opposite to black hat SEO techniques. White Hat SEO is all about putting in the hard work for the long-term benefits but doing everything morally and legally, instead of being underhand.

Guest Blogging:

The process of writing a blog post for someone else’s blog is called guest blogging. The incentive for doing this is getting backlinks to increase the guest bloggers site and search engine rankings. Naturally, it is sensible to be cautious when using content from a guest blogger on your website. However, when done right, guest blogging can be extremely beneficial for your website. It helps to increase audience reach, exposure and is a great branding tool.

Link Baiting:

Link baiting is the creation of content that encourages people to link to your page from another website. The goal is to encourage your audience so much that they can’t help but tell everyone about what they have just read. The key to success is knowing your audience.

Quality Content:

The more content-rich your site is, the more valuable it will appear to the search engines, your human visitors and to other webmasters who will be far more likely to link to your website if they find you to be a solid resource on their subject. Creating good content can be very time-consuming, however it will be well-worth the time and effort in the long run.
Writing high-quality content should be a key aspect of every SEO strategy. Well-written blog posts are much more likely to be shared on social media or talked about among friends. For a post to be shared on social media, you must convince someone to read the piece itself. Quality content leads to higher ranking and high conversions. Writing awesome blog posts won’t improve your ranking instantly. But it will have a positive effect on your SEO in the long-run. Attractive texts have lower bounce rates and higher chances to receive social media attention.

Growing Your Audience

The best way to grow your audience is with a variety of engaging content. This includes informative posts, humorous images, videos, promotions, polls and any other type of interactive status updates that grab the attention of the audience. Once this kind of content is being regularly produced, to a high standard, social media managers should consider promoting their content so more that more people see it. Share your content on all social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This will help spread the word about your brand and, if posted regularly, will help to increase your number of real fans and followers.

Automation

Automation helps save time. However, automation tools should only be used to help make the posting process less time consuming. Although some services can make social media management tasks easier, it is important to remember that interactions with fans and followers should come off as authentic, and not from a robot.

Conclusion 

 There are plenty more black and white hat SEO techniques, we have only named some of the most common. Here at Bamboo Nine we proudly use white hat SEO techniques to further the success of our business. We believe in cultivating trust with our clients by being fully transparent and delivering top-quality results!