Achieve Top Ranking

There have been lots of news stories recently about private wheel clamping companies. One in particular mentioned a man who had his car clamped outside his own residence. 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 display this to them he still was obliged to pay £300 to get the clamp removed. The comment was made that the behaviour of the clamping business were legal but were they ethical. This real life situation really helps depict the many methods used to promote websites online by a Search Engine Optimisation Company. They are called respectively Black Hat and White Hat optimisation.

The 2 names come from a reference to early 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 strategies are used by Online Marketing companies to get an instantaneous financial return from the website and the fact that the site will mostly end up being banned is of little significance. Keyword Stuffing involves placing repeating sequences of keywords in either the meta tags or actual content of the web page. Cloaking is a practice that is mostly run by server side scripting and it shows a different version of a internet page to a search engine spider than the one that is seen in the website browser. This hidden internet page will contain repetitions of keywords. Doorway pages work in a comparable way, but since most search engines now discover and remove from their listings any doorway pages they find, most doorway pages tend to just try and trick the searcher into clicking a link for redirection. As already mentioned all these methods will result in better Search Engine Placement in the short term, but will certainly destroy a fine online reputation in the process.

The good guy is White Hat Online Marketing; this is the ethical way of publicising your website and whilst Black Hat Online Marketing is usually aimed at the search engines, White Hat Online Marketing considers the human audience. It is a long term practice that follows 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 are much more intensive and time consuming than their Black Hat equivalents. Keyword analysis involves interacting with a client to find out as much as possible about their company to compile a keyword list, then using the many search engine analytical tools picking the best to use for their web site. Both back linking and link building build page ranking in a comparable way by linking a web site to others offering comparable products or services. The practice of writing content for human audiences it the most time consuming of all the White Hat practices and is definitely not used by the unethical Black Hat fraternity.