As you are probably aware, there are countless techniques in Search Engine Optimization. With countless techniques,
come countless uses, and countless ways of executing them. This brings us to the good people and bad people of the
SEO game.
The good ones are the white hat practitioners of the same, and the morally grey users of SEO are black-hat users,
and these techniques are termed black-hat techniques. Let us look at the differences in these two methods.
TERMINOLOGY
Your free website audit tool will advise you
against using some techniques if it finds you using them unknowingly.
These are black-hat techniques, so called due to their unethical nature, and paying homage to Black hat- wearing
mafia in Western movies. White-hat is a term coined in response to black hat techniques. These are the techniques
that we have spoken so often about on Search Munky.
ENGINE GUIDELINES
Once your short term goals for traffic and SERP have been reached, you can go heavy with more orthodox techniques
and approach to maintain this position that you have attained. It serves as a springboard for your future, white hat
SEO strategy. Usually brands that opt to use this strategy have a deadline or immediate requirement for engagement
and traffic.
TERM OR LONG TERM
Black-hat techniques are employed for exponential short term gain while risking long term credibility. If caught,
Google flags the website, which severely affects SERP ranking potential and, subsequently, traffic. White-hat
techniques are relatively slower in terms of generating leads and driving traffic, but these are extremely
beneficial to your website in the longer run, which takes into account the credit accumulated through fair SEO,
longevity in SERP rankings, backlink juice etc.
MONEY INVOLVEMENT
Black-hat techniques of SEO generally involve the usage of money, or some sort of equivalent exchange. The more
money that goes into the process, the quicker will be the desired result, but the less credible your website will be
for future ventures. White-hat techniques are free and involve only strategy and high quality content curation to
achieve steadily increasing results.
USAGE OF SEO TECHNIQUES (backlinks)
Black-hat techniques of SEO generally involve the usage of money, or some sort of equivalent exchange. The more
money that goes into the process, the quicker will be the desired result, but the less credible your website will be
for future ventures. White-hat techniques are free and involve only strategy and high quality content curation to
achieve steadily increasing results.Black-hat techniques include adding invisible irrelevant text, buying backlinks
to your website, stuffing your content with too many unnecessary keywords, reporting competitors unfairly etc. These
techniques may go unnoticed if carried out by experts, and can yield high short term ROI. White-hat techniques
include keyword strategy, giving links to other pages, optimizing website feasibility, using alt tags for images,
etc and are excellent long term strategies for traffic and SERP results.
It is always wiser to work using white-hat techniques and avoid any and all chances of getting into Google's bad
books. However, if you're up for it and you want quick substantial results, you can opt for a seasoned black-hat
practitioner. The choice is yours!