White Hat vs Grey Hat vs Black Hat SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Tactics

[kattman]

SEO means Search Engine Optimiztion

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

Based on this factors, SEO tactics have been incorporated into web site development and design. As the search engines are logic-based it can follow that there are specific tactics that work with their algorithms, and other tactics that do not.

These tactics are divided into three categories namely -

• White-Hat SEO tactics
• Grey-Hat SEO tactics
• Black-Hat SEO tactics

SEO tactics are divided depending on whether SEO tactics are legitimate ( White-hat ) , arguable ( Grey-hat ), or purely Black-hat.

[kattman]

White-Hat SEO Tactics

Any SEO tactic that maintains the integrity of your website and the SERPs (search engine results pages) is considered a "white-hat" search engine optimization tactic. These are the only tactics that we will use whenever applicable and which enhance rather than detract from your website and from the rankings.

White-Hat SEO Tactics:

• Internal Linking
  By far one of the easiest ways to stop your website from ranking well on the search engines is to make it difficult for search engines to find their way through it. Many sites use some form of script to enable fancy drop-down navigation, etc. Many of these scripts cannot be crawled by the search engines resulting in unindexed pages.
  
  While many of these effects add visual appeal to a website, if you are using scripts or some other form of navigation that will hinder the spidering of your website it is important to add text links to the bottom of at least your homepage linking to all you main internal pages including a sitemap to your internal pages.
  
  
• Reciprocal Linking
  Exchanging links with other webmasters is a good way (not the best, but good) of attaining additional incoming links to your site. While the value of reciprocal links has declined a bit over the past year they certainly still do have their place.
  
  A VERY important note is that if you do plan on building reciprocal links it is important to make sure that you do so intelligently. Random reciprocal link building in which you exchange links with any and virtually all sites that you can will not help you over the long run. Link only to sites that are related to yours and who's content your visitors will be interested in and preferably which contain the keywords that you want to target. Building relevancy through association is never a bad thing unless you're linking to bad neighborhoods (penalized industries and/or websites).
  
  If you are planning or currently do undertake reciprocal link building you know how time consuming this process can be. An useful tool that can speed up the process is PRProwler. Essentially this tool allows you to find related sites with high PageRank, weeding out many of the sites that would simply be a waste of time to even visit. You can read more about PRProwler on our search engine positioning tools page.
  
  
• Content Creation
  Don't confuse "content creation" with doorway pages and the such. When we recommend content creation we are discussing creating quality, unique content that will be of interest to your visitors and which will add value to your site.
  
  The more content-rich your site is the more valuable it will appear to the search engines, your human visitors, and to other webmasters who will be far more likely to link to your website if they find you to be a solid resource on their subject.
  
  Creating good content can be very time-consuming, however it will be well worth the effort in the long run. As an additional bonus, these new pages can be used to target additional keywords related to the topic of the page.
  
  
• Writing For Others
  You know more about your business that those around you so why not let everyone know? Whether it be in the form of articles, forum posts, or a spotlight piece on someone else's website, creating content that other people will want to read and post on their sites is one of the best ways to build links to your website that don't require a reciprocal link back.
  
  
• Site Optimization
  The manipulation of your content, wording, and site structure for the purpose of attaining high search engine positioning is the backbone of SEO and the search engine positioning industry. Everything from creating solid title and meta tags to tweaking the content to maximize it's search engine effectiveness is key to any successful optimization effort.

[kattman]

Grey-Hat SEO Tactics

The SEO tactics that fall in the grey area between legitimate tactics and search engine spam are considered to be "grey-hat" SEO Tactics. They include tactics such as cloaking, paid links, duplicate content and a number of others. Unless you are on the correct side of this equation these tactics are not recommended.

Grey-Hat SEO Tactics:

• Cloaking
  White Side - There are times when cloaking is considered a legitimate tactic by users and search engines alike. Basically, if there is a logical reason why you should be allowed to present different information to the search engines than the visitor (if you have content behind a "members only" area for example) you are relatively safe. Another example of a site legitimately using cloaking, is when the site is mainly image-based such as an art site. In this event, provided that the text used to represent the page accurately defines the page and image(s) on it, this could be considered a legitimate use of cloaking.
  
  Black Side - This tactic is considered to be very risky and it is recommended that you contact each search engine, present your reasoning, and allow them the opportunity to approve it's use.
  
  
• Duplicate Content
  Black Side - Duplicate content on the web has increasingly became a significant problem for both search engines as well as search engine users alike with the same or similar sitesdominating the top positions in the search engine results pages.
  
  To address this problem many search engines have added filters that seek out pages with the same or very similar content and eliminate the duplicate. Even at times when the duplicate content is not detected by the search engines it is often reported by competitors and the site's rankings penalized.
  
  White Side - There are times when duplicate content is considered legitimate by both search engines and visitors and that is on resource sites. A site that consists primarily as an index of articles on a specific subject-matter will not be penalized by posting articles that occur elsewhere on the net, though the weight it may be given as additional content will likely not be as high as a page of unique content.

[kattman]

Black-Hat SEO Tactics

The "black-hat" tactics are not intended to help you "trick" the search engines but rather to warn you against these tactics. You will find information on SEO tactics that have been or at the very least should and certainly will be banned by the major search engines. These are tactics that are subject to large scale abuse.
WARNING: do NOT use these tactics. They will get your website penalized and/or banned, if not today then soon.

Black-Hat SEO Tactics

• Keyword Stuffing
  This is probably one of the most commonly abused forms of search engine spam. Essentially this is when a webmaster or SEO places a large number of instances of the targeted keyword phrase in hopes that the search engine will read this as relevant. In order to offset the fact that this text generally reads horribly it will often be placed at the bottom of a page and in a very small font size. An additional tactic that is often associated with this practice is hidden text which is commented on below.
  
  
• Doorway Pages
  Doorway pages are pages added to a website solely to target a specific keyword phrase or phrases and provide little in the way of value to a visitor. Generally the content on these pages provide no information and the page is only there to promote a phrase in hopes that once a visitor lands there, that they will go to the homepage and continue on from there. Often to save time these pages are generated by software and added to a site automatically. This is a very dangerous practice. Not only are many of the methods of injecting doorway pages banned by the search engines but a quick report to the search engine of this practice and your website will simply disappear along with all the legitimate ranks you have attained with your genuine content pages.
  
  
• Duplicate Content Operation
  If the targeted pages’ content where to be duped on some throwaway “bad neighborhood” domains, possibly embedded in spammy keywords (e.g. porn, pills, casinos), invisible text, etc., this may result in both sets of pages being deindexed.
  
  
• Over-Submission Operation
  While the effect of this approach is generally deemed questionable, attackers have been know to over-submit pages (typically within a fully automated setup) to the search engines either from a single IP or even spread across a set of seemingly unrelated IPs.
  
  
• Redirection Operation
  If hackers where to implement 301 redirects to the targeted pages/domains from some “bad neighborhood” (e.g. porn sites, link farms, etc.) this could result in the attacked pages being deindexed.
  
  
• Interlinking
  This tactic is more difficult to detect than others when done "correctly" . This tactic is difficult to detect from a user standpoint unless you end up with multiple sites in the top positions on the search engines in which case it is likely that you will be reported.As incoming links became more important for search engine positioning the practice of building multiple websites and linking them together to build the overall link popularity of them all became a common practice.

[kattman]

Getting indexed and Prevent Crawling

Getting indexed

The leading search engines, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically.
Some search engines, notably Yahoo!, operate a paid submission service that guarantee crawling for either a set fee or cost per click. Such programs usually guarantee inclusion in the database, but do not guarantee specific ranking within the search results. Yahoo's paid inclusion program has drawn criticism from advertisers and competitors.
Two major directories, the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project both require manual submission and human editorial review.
Google offers Google Webmaster Tools, for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that aren't discoverable by automatically following links.

Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled.


Preventing crawling

To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes, webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine's database by using a meta tag specific to robots.
When a search engine visits a site, the robots.txt located in the root directory is the first file crawled. The robots.txt file is then parsed, and will instruct the robot as to which pages are not to be crawled. As a search engine crawler may keep a cached copy of this file, it may on occasion crawl pages a webmaster does not wish crawled. Pages typically prevented from being crawled include login specific pages such as shopping carts and user-specific content such as search results from internal searches.
In March 2007, Google warned webmasters that they should prevent indexing of internal search results because those pages are considered search spam.

[kattman]

Top Search Engine Optimization Tips

1. Set the best keywords

One of the most important point to optimize your search engine is set the best keywords for your content. The keywords you set for your content must be closely related to the content as well as unique (different from others).

2. Translating your website into other languages

If you are promoting your website to only English speaking web-surfers you are missing out on a potential 64.8% extra traffic. This is because 64.8% of people on the internet surf and search in a language other than English.
Google alone spiders and understands 35 different languages, and have plans to add more.

3. Discover Your Competitors

Search engines analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria. So it is very important to know how many incoming links your competitors have will give you a fantastic edge. Of course, you still have to discover your competitors before you can analyze them.
My tool of choice is SEO Elite, which digs through the major search engines by keyword to not only tell you who your competitors are, but also provides you with an in-depth analysis of each competitor.
The analysis includes these extremely important linking criteria (super SEO tips), such as:

• Competitor rank in the Search Engines
• Number of incoming links
• What keywords are in the title of linking page
• % of links containing keywords in the link text
• The PageRank of linking pages
• The Alexa traffic ranking information

4. Optimize Your Title META tags

The Title and META tags should be different on every page of your website if you wish for most search engines to store and list them in the search results.
META tag is the text that will be displayed under your title on the results page. META tags are hidden code read only by search engine webcrawlers (also called spiders). They live within the HEAD section of a web page. There are actually 2 very important META tags you need to worry about: description and keywords. Meta tags summarize what the site is about, and despite some SEO controversy, they still play an instrumental role in meta-based search engines. The META tags you need to be the most concerned about are:

• description
• keywords

[kattman]

5. Create internal linking structure

It is very important to create internal linking within your site. This enables the end-users to navigate your site that is well thought out by you. Not only that people can find all of your content and products, But also so search engines can.

6. Use headings, title and ALT attributes

Headings play an important role in organizing information, so be sure to include at least H1-H3 when assembling your page.
Specifying Title Attribute is a direct way of telling the search engines about the relevance of the link. It's also a W3C standard for making your page accessible to disabled people. In other words, blind folks can navigate through your website using a special browser that reads Title and ALT attributes.

The syntax is:


The ALT Attribute is used similarly as Title Attribute, but is specifically for describing an image to the search engine.


7. Set keywords for images and media

Whenever possible, you should save your images, media, and web pages with the keywords in the file names. Many SEO's have experienced improvement in ranking by renaming images and media.

8. Include a robots.txt file

The easiest SEO tip to search engine optimization is include a robots.txt file at the root of your website. Open up a text editor, such as Notepad and type "User-agent: *". Then save the file as robots.txt and upload it to your root directory on your domain. This one command will tell any spider that hits your website to "please feel free to crawl every page of my website".

9. Install a sitemap.xml for Google

You may feel like it is impossible to get listed high in Google's search engine result page, believe it or not that isn't Google's intention. They simply want to insure that their viewers get the most relevant results possible. In fact, they've even created a program just for webmasters to help insure that your pages get cached in their index as quickly as possible. They call the program Google Sitemaps. In this tool, you'll also find a great new linking tool to help discover who is linking to your website.

10. ROR Sitemaps

If your website is selling products, ROR sitemaps are ideal as you can offer up a lot more information about your products. A ROR file enables you to document your product names, descriptions, prices, images, availability and any other relevant information.

[judryn27]

Thanx kattman..
that was a nice stuff about SEO.
Can you give any info about green hat SEO.

[Expertz]

A Green Hat SEO is just a matter of putting all unnecessary procedures and SEO actions to an end and focusing on what all is essential to get in website visitors. When focus is given more on the importance and prominence to the people who visit your website, your site will create more brand awareness, thereby becoming more trustworthy, rather than targeting keywords that provide more traffic.