I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz lately about so-called white-hat and black-hat SEO practices.  But what exactly is the difference, and does it matter?  I saw a great article this morning on the SEO Traffic Spider that clarified things for me:

White Hat SEO uses strategies which are considered ethically correct and legitimate by SEO’s as well as search engines while spidering a site.

So does it matter whether you use ethical or unethical practices of SEO?  Well aside from the philosophical perspective on this, yes it does.  Among other things, you can be completely banned or drilled down in the results for trying to manipulate search engines like Google.  Is it worth it?  Probably not.

One of the nuances of the Online world is that people are very sensitive about their privacy and knowing that the people they’re interacting with virtually are being honest.  So, my intentionally manipulating search engine results, you can very seriously hurt your online presence and reputation.

With that said, what are the ethical ways of increasing your search ranking?

  1. Links – one of the most powerful ways of increasing your rankings is to have people linking to you.  Most powerfully is when someone points to you, secondly is when you point to each other (reciprocal links)
  2. Content – Your content is going to not only determine your ranking, but also your conversion, so take the time to do it right.
  3. Optimization – simply stated, using the keywords in your content you’re looking to be known for.

So, good luck, and have fun with drawing people to you!