White hat, black hat and grey hats are some of the SEO techniques that you will be using to rank your website in Google at a good position. Many people wonder, is Google wearing any colored hat and why these colored hats determine our positions in SERP.
OK, here let me tell you that we are not talking about any hat it is just Google has named its techniques into different techniques. The darker the hat, the more unethical techniques you are using.
It is the degree of purity of techniques you are using. These degrees are symbolized by its color of purity. White hat techniques are the most ethical techniques whereas black is the most unethical way to rank in Google. While Grey hat stands for the techniques that are mutual to black and white hat techniques.
Need Of White Hat, Black Hat And Grey Hat Techniques
Some years back, these three terms were not even thought of. There were only few techniques used in SEO to rank in Google. We are talking about Google because 99% of us struggle to rank in the biggest search engine “Google” and that is why these techniques are introduced by Google.
OK, we were saying that few years back there was no use of any techniques because the techniques to upload information in a word press website was enough to rank in Google. But, because use of unethical tactics to rank your page on Google increased and that played a vital role in emerging White, black and grey hat techniques in SEO.
Few years back say Google decided to authenticate a page according to the links coming in. People started spamming the links by creating fake links or taking links from irrelevant sources. This obviously provides traffic to your website but it attracts unwilling audience or non-potential customers.
Let us just briefly know what exactly white, black and gray hat techniques stand for.
White Hat Techniques In SEO
White hat technique stands for pure technique through which one can rank in any of the search engines. White hat techniques were introduced by Google; basically it does not have any set of instruction. It is just you have to take care of terms and policies mentioned by Google or any search engines.
You follow the proper guidelines mentioned by Google and congrats your website is all under white hat technique banner.
Let us list some of the healthy practices for white hat SEO techniques.
- Quality content: OK, again we are talking about the content quality. We already know the importance of quality and unique content in SEO which is a White hat technique in SEO.
Content is king, we know about this so it is the most important white hat technique that can provide you a good ranking in search engines.
2. Title and meta description: Provide every important information about your page in the title and description part. Title and the description can be assumed as the front face of your showroom so; you need to be very careful while describing it. You need to cover up your all the important keywords in the Title and in the description. This is a healthy practice and falls under white hat SEO.
3. Quality Inbound links: This is also an important white hat SEO technique that is used to give a positive mark to your website. Quality inbound link ensures that the website you are getting link from is recommending your website. This leaves a good impression on the Google for you website hence it ranks your website in SERP.
4. Relevant keyword placing: Keywords should be placed only at relevant places where they serve the purpose. They should not be placed everywhere in the content just to gain rankings. It may improve ranking for sometime but later your page will be spammed.
These are some of the healthy White hat SEO techniques and this will surely provide you a long term benefits like online brand reputation.
Black Hat Techniques In SEO
Black hat SEO technique is considered as the most unethical method to rank a website. Anything against the policies of search engines are under black hat techniques.
Black hat techniques consist of techniques like:
- Keyword stuffing: Unnecessarily overusing the keywords or any other important word is known as keyword stuffing. This will show the relevancy of the keyword searched by the user but on the other hand it is not the most useful it is only the over usage of the keyword.
- Cloaking: cloaking is a technique in which people fools the Google by manipulating it. They basically do this by showing some different content to the Google and show different to the users. Best examples would be the porn websites that are not getting rank on search engines. This helps them to draw traffic to their website but most of the traffic is not the potential audience.
- Doorway pages- These pages are created for purpose of irrelevant redirection from one page to other which may not be irreverent.
- Link farming- It means manipulating your website by increasing the number of inbound links from websites connected with each other.
- Hidden text and links- It means writing keywords or adding links on white background which is invisible to the user but visible to the google.
- Commenting- It means to generate backlinks by commenting to the other websites or blogs and left your link there to bring traffic from there readers.
- Unnecessary redirects- It is used to send user from one page that may be expired or closed to other page. But sometimes these redirects can be irrelevant. Many a times they send a user to a movie site or others.
- Content spinning- It means writing the same content with synonyms or modifications that reduce the chances of being detected by plagiarism tools.
These are few black hat SEO techniques that might help you once rank at a good position but will suddenly drops you down to the floor. This might lead to banning of you website from search engines.
Grey Hat SEO Techniques
Grey hat SEO techniques are those techniques that are not either ethical or they are unethical. Grey hat techniques are mainly known to be the over usage of white had techniques.
Example: Keyword density is to be managed in order to get good on page SEO score but if the keyword density reaches more than the recommended usage then it might be a violation of terms and policies of search engines and this is considered as grey hat techniques.
This doesn’t mean that your webpage will be penalized but if you will not take care of the updating policies of Google then it might harm you in future.
It is considered fare to rank your page using grey hat techniques but you never know when Google will enhance its system and drop down your results.
We got to know the do’s and don’ts while adopting any SEO techniques. If you want to play long and with good name you should go for ethical white hat techniques. If you don’t want to set up the things for long and just want to rank on search engines no matter for how long? Then you can use black or grey hat SEO techniques as well.