SEO techniques are classified into two broad categories:
- Techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design referred to as White Hat SEO, and
- Techniques that search engines do not approve and attempt to minimize the effect of referred to as Black Hat or spamdexing.
White Hat SEO:
An SEO tactic, technique or method is considered as White Hat if it follows the followings
- If it conforms to the search engine's guidelines.
- If it does not involves any deception.
- It ensures that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.
- It ensures that a Web Page content should have been created for the users and not just for the search engines.
- It ensures the good quality of the web pages
- It ensures the useful content available on the web pages
Always follow a White Hat SEO tactic and don't try to fool your site visitors. Be honest and definitely you will get something more.
Next chapter onward we will put light on White Hap SEO techniques. The WHST are very simple and can be done without investing much cost.
Black Hat or Spamdexing:
An SEO tactic, technique or method is considered as Black Hat or Spamdexing if it follows the followings
- Try to improve rankings that are disapproved of by the search engines and/or involve deception.
- Redirecting users from a page that is built for search engines to one that is more human friendly.
- Redirecting users to a page that was different from the page the search engine ranked.
- Serving one version of a page to search engine spiders/bots and another version to human visitors. This is called Cloaking SEO tactic.
- Using Hidden or invisible text or with the page background color, using a tiny font size or hiding them within the HTML code such as "no frame" sections.
- Repeating keywords in the Meta tags, and using keywords that are unrelated to the site's content. This is called Meta tag stuffing.
- Calculated placement of keywords within a page to raise the keyword count, variety, and density of the page. This is called Keyword stuffing .
- Creating low-quality web pages that contain very little content but are instead stuffed with very similar key words and phrases. These pages are called Doorway or Gateway Pages
- Mirror web sites by hosting multiple web sites all with conceptually similar content but using different URLs.
- Creating a rogue copy of a popular web site which shows contents similar to the original to a web crawler, but redirects web surfers to unrelated or malicious web sites. This is called Page hijacking.
Always be away to adopt any of the above Black Hat tactic to improve the rank of your site. Search engines are smart enough to identify all the above proprieties of your site and ultimately you are not going to get anything.