What are White-Hat and Black-Hat techniques of SEO?

Given that the broad concept of the Search Engine Optimization is precisely what usually draws the line between a fairly successful online project and a complete business failure, it’s very important to make a clear difference between good (otherwise, White-Hat) and bad (otherwise Black-Hat) techniques of SEO. Ultimately, to make sure you have everything in place using only “legal” approaches and generally accepted techniques of SEO – and never get penalized for “cheating” with Google’s truly sophisticated search ranking algorithm. So, let’s delve.

What Makes Black-Hat Techniques of SEO

Basically, this type techniques of SEO are related to the usage of unlawful or too aggressive strategies, and practices focused only on elevating search engine rankings at all cost, rather than contributing to a good human browsing experience. Most commonly, Black-Hat SEO is employed by those webmasters and online business owners who need a quick and immediate financial return on a given website or blog with a minimum effort, instead of making a reliable long-term investment. Here are the most common techniques of Black-Hat SEO:

• Low-Quality Link Farms – is a so-called form of “spamming the index” of the major search engines. While everything may look quite standard regular, such web page will commonly have a low-quality profile of contextual links coming from random and completely unrelated third-party web sources (for example, websites dealing with pharmacy, gambling, adultery, etc.).
• “Keyword Stuffing” – stands for a formerly widely used practice of focusing on SEO keywords and their long-tail combinations solely. It suggests just putting as many keywords within your context as physically possible – taking no care about the actual user experience and making no sense after all.
• Blog/Comment Spam – suggests posting massive random comments or promoting low-quality automated shreds of on-page content just for the sake of higher rankings. Most commonly, those type of definitely manipulative and tricky techniques is related to PBNs (otherwise, Private Blog Networks), plagiarism-based content publishing, content scraping, using doorway pages and jump redirects, as well as parasite hosting for spawning massive count of spammy backlinks).

What Makes White-Hat Techniques of SEO

The broadest concept of White-Hat Search Engine Optimization is generally related to everything opposed to that badass Black-Hat SEO. In fact, it’s all about investing your time and effort in setting long-term progress with your website’s or blog’s organic rankings in Google’s relevant SERPs. 

So, White-Hat techniques of SEO are revolving mainly around having everything in place – to be done legally and morally, without being underhand as follows:

• Guest Blogging – is the process of creating dedicated blog posts to be published on a given relevant and fully trusted third-party web source for getting a valuable backlink in return.
• Link Baiting – stands for the strategy of encouraging people to link to your website or blog, naturally and organically. Put simply, Link Baiting is making people love your high-quality content that is actually worth not only reading, but getting liked, shared, and further promoted throughout your target audience.
• High-Quality Content – remember, your on-page content itself is arguably the most important SEO asset you should be using for fairly efficient online promotion in the longer run. Yes, creating a really killing content is a definitely time-consuming and labor-intensive task. But it always pays off, for sure.