Black Hat or White Hat: The Recipe for SEO Secret Sauce

Don’t fall prey to lazy SEO practices: The secret to perfect SEO strategy is within your reach!

What are the benefits of using SEO in a digital age?

If you’ve done any sort of trend-based research, you’ve probably heard of ‘SEO secret sauce’: it’s a buzzword that gets people thinking about their marketing strategies. The right SEO strategy brings potential leads to you, virtually eliminating the need for expensive, ineffective outbound marketing. But like any secret sauce, most companies aren’t willing to share their money-making strategies.

It’s time to spill the beans.

First, you should know that SEO best practice guides separate SEO techniques into two basic categories: Black Hat and White Hat. In a broad sense, your SEO strategy is either one or the other. The differences are important, so let’s take a look:

• Black Hat: Simply put, black hat SEO aims to get the highest search rankings possible by any means necessary. Characteristically aggressive, and usually unethical, black hat generally flies in the face of search engines’ TOS’s. Typical strategies include keyword stuffing, link farming, writing hidden text/links, and comment spamming.

• White Hat: If we’re still thinking in terms of the “SEO secret sauce,” black hat is the habanero, and white hat is the jalapeno; it’s still effective and delivers a good kick, while also maintaining balance in the sauce. Black hat ignores both the terms of a search engine and the satisfaction of the reader. White hat diligently produces high-quality content, thereby benefiting from market research and analysis.

There’s so much controversy surrounding Black Hat because it uses techniques that don’t benefit the user, unapologetically exploiting loopholes just to attain higher search rankings than the site deserves. The results, while objectively fast, just don’t last: illegal rule-dodging is quickly penalized, making it a terrible investment in any site’s future.

SEO Best Practice Checklist

For most companies, the best part about White Hat is also the hardest part – its rewards are long-lasting and promise great rankings, but it takes diligent research and continuous effort. If done right, though, White Hat is worth the investment. Follow this SEO best practices checklist when formulating a White Hat SEO strategy:

• Enlist a Trustworthy SEO Company: It’s interesting how often this is overlooked. While SEO definitely shouldn’t be your entire marketing strategy, it’s a fine art that should be handled by a capable firm.

• Know Your Audience: White Hat SEO benefits from connecting with the reader, and using search engines the way they were meant to be used. Do the research you need to develop the perfect keywords and maintain a consistent tone.

• Keep an Eye on Quality: In 2012, Google released their Panda update that rewards websites publishing high-quality content. Black Hat SEO falls right through this kind of scrutiny, as it simply doesn’t concern itself with quality of any kind. Quality over quantity is the key to success with White Hat, so don’t be afraid to do the legwork to get there.

Enlist Farotech for Your First Step toward Quality SEO

Finding the right company to stay by your side throughout the process of creating an SEO strategy is crucial. At Farotech, we know the importance of having the experts on your side, and we work diligently to create a strategy that works for you–a commitment reflected in this SEO best practice guide. There’s a lot to know about SEO, don’t let these 17 SEO myths derail your strategy. Email us today and discover how much better a secret sauce tastes with the right ingredients.

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