Halloween is approaching, with ghoulies and goblins waiting impatiently in the shadows for their night to roam free.   Hundreds of happy haunts await you as the scariest day of the year approaches!  Have you bought your costume for the office Halloween party yet?  Perhaps you’ve chosen to be a delicate angel or heroic cowboy.  Or maybe you’ll be a grinning devil or evil pirate?  Choosing your identity for Halloween is a fun affair and costumes can run the gamut from pure and innocent to truly frightening.

The internet is no different.  Websites have identities also, and they last much longer than a single night.  Depending on your website’s ‘costume’, you can have a successful site that performs well in the search engines, or one that relies on nefarious means to rank well temporarily, but which eventually gets banned from the major search engines.

What is your website’s identity?

An SEO can choose which end of the spectrum they will work from, using either ‘white hat’ or ‘black hat’ techniques.  White hat techniques are generally long-lasting, and have beneficial results for your website.  Both site visitors and the search engines view a site using white hat techniques positively.  An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines’ guidelines and involves no deception.  Black hat techniques rely on deceptive practices to improve search engine ranking, are often temporary and are implemented with the knowledge that the site may be banned either temporarily or permanently from the search engines or that their rankings will eventually drop sharply. 

Unfortunately, there are some SEOs and website owners who implement black hat techniques on their sites, in the hopes that they can have the edge on their competition. We’ve even been asked by clients to work in the grey or in the black!  There are also situations where a client may have read about a certain technique and wants to use it, but doesn’t really know that it’s ‘black hat’ per se or what the implications might be for their website.  We do our best to educate them and make sure they receive ethical search engine optimization advice.

Where can I get a devil costume? (What ARE those dastardly ‘black hat’ techniques?)

Here are some of the more well-known black hat SEO techniques:

Keyword stuffing-This technique involves literally ‘stuffing’ the meta description tag and keyword tag full of keywords, in the hopes that a search engine will think that the page is more relevant for those keywords than a competing page.  This technique came into being in the 90s in the online adult, pharmaceutical and gambling industries and spread to all areas of the internet.  These tags have been so heavily abused that all major search engines now completely disregard the keyword tag and only give the meta description tag a cursory glance.  Best practice? Only use the keyword tag for alternate spellings or misspellings of your keywords and use your meta description to describe the content of your page honestly and concisely in 1 or 2 sentences, at most.

Hidden text-This technique appears both onsite and in the code of the website.  Keyword-stuffed content can be hidden from the visitor by using CSS to position it off-screen, using excessively small text or by using text that is the same color as the background.  Stuffed text can also be hidden in the code using < comment > and < noscript > tags.  The purpose of comment tags is for developers to include useful tips within the site code. The < noscript > tag is used to inform a user that a script is being used but that their browser either doesn’t support the script or they have scripts turned off. Search engines are savvy and will penalize all instances of hidden text.  Best practice?  Supply only well-written, relevant content on your website, with nothing hidden anywhere.  Content is king, and good content will help you rank well!

Cloaking-This technique involves serving up a different page based on whether the visitor is a human or a search engine.  Cloaking involves showing content based on the IP address or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user. A user identified as search engine is shown a specifically prepared and optimized webpage with the sole purpose of ranking well for specific keywords.  A human is taken to the ‘real’ website.  Cloaking is also used to trick users to visit certain websites based on their description in search engines. Best practice?  Don’t do it.  Serve up the right content to every visitor, human or not.

Doorway pages- Doorway or ‘gateway’ pages are designed for search engines and not for human visitors. They are essentially fake pages that are stuffed with content and highly optimized for 1 or 2 keywords that link to a target or landing page. The end user never sees these pages because they are automatically redirected to the target page.  Search engines spiders are quick to detect these pages and ban them as spam.

I want an angel costume!  (How can I implement ‘white hat’ techniques?)

White hat SEO is easy: be honest! 

Use well-written content on your site that uses keywords naturally.  Write for your real-life visitors, not the search engines, as the engines know when content flows naturally and makes sense.  Use keywords naturally in the text and don’t stuff them in willy-nilly.

Though the search engines don’t put as much importance on the meta tags anymore, the meta description still carries a little weight and your title tags are your strongest areas of real estate.  Make sure your page titles truly represent what is in the content of the page, both for search engines and users.

Do excellent keyword research and use your keywords thoughtfully and effectively.

Maintain high quality inbound links to your website.  This will lend your site authority, increase PageRank and bring highly-qualified traffic to your site, resulting in higher conversions and sales.  ‘High quality’ links come from other websites that have good standing in the search engines and are contextually relevant to the content of your page.

With black hat-driven websites lurking in the web, it can seem daunting to participate in online media and earn good ranking in the search engines.  But never fear!  With the right tactics, you can rank well and be a ‘hero’ online.  Make sure your SEO account executive uses ethical, white hat tactics to drive your site to the top!

A great site dedicated to Black Hat SEO-The Bad SEO Page

Here is a Halloween blast from the past from Disney’s Haunted Mansion (yes, it’s Walt Disney in the middle!).  Have a great Halloween everyone!  Grim Grinning Ghosts

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 9th, 2009 at 10:32 am and is filed under Advanced SEO Concepts, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.