There have been lots of news stories recently about private wheel clamping businesses. One in particular mentioned a man who had his car clamped outside his own apartment. He had a parking permit but unfortunately it had fallen down from his windscreen so was not visible to the clampers, and even though he was able to show this to them he still was obligated to pay three hundred pounds to get the clamp removed. The observation was made that the behaviour of the clamping business were legal but were they ethical. This real life situation really helps explain the many methods used to promote websites online by a SEO Company. They are called correspondingly Black Hat and White Hat optimisation.
The two names come from a reference to old American westerns, where the bad guy always wore a black hat and the good guy wore a white one. Therefore Black Hat optimisation is the bad guy, it’s not necessarily illegal but it is unethical. Some examples of Black Hat Online Marketing are keyword stuffing, cloaking and doorway pages, all of these methods are used by Online Marketing businesses to get an immediate financial return from the website and the fact that the site will normally end up being banned is of little importance. Keyword Stuffing involves placing recurring sequences of keywords in both the meta tags or actual content of the web page. Cloaking is a practice that is normally run by server side scripting and it shows a different version of a web page to a search engine spider than the one that is displayed in the browser. This hidden web page will contain repetitions of keywords. Doorway pages work in a similar way, but since most search engines now identify and remove from their listings any doorway pages they find, most doorway pages tend to just try and trick the visitor into clicking a link for redirection. As already mentioned all these methods will result in much better Search Engine Placement in the short term, but will certainly destroy a good internet reputation in the process.
The good guy is White Hat Online Marketing; this is the ethical way of promoting your internet site and whilst Black Hat Online Marketing is mainly aimed at the search engines, White Hat Online Marketing takes into consideration the human audience. It is a long term practice that follows very closely the search engines rules and policies. Some examples of White Hat Online Marketing are keyword analysis, back linking, link building and writing content for human readers. All of these strategies are more intensive and time consuming than their Black Hat equivalents. Keyword analysis involves interacting with a client to find out all you can about their business to put together a keyword list, then using the many search engine analytical tools choosing the best to use for their internet site. Both back linking and link building build page ranking in a similar way by linking a internet site to others offering similar products or services. The practice of writing content for human audiences it the most time consuming of all the White Hat strategies and is definitely not used by the unethical Black Hat fraternity.
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