When you’re first getting started with internet marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) is a term that you’re going to see over and over as the best way to get targeted traffic to your website. It sounds like some kind of magic, and everyone’s hiring marketers to do it for them. So you know you need to invest some of your marketing budget into this and make it work for you.
But then you hear some other industry terms like white hat, black hat and gray hat. You immediately think of the old Spy-Vs-Spy comics from the Mad Magazine heyday and wonder what that cloak-and-dagger stuff has to do with online marketing.
Well, here are some quick explanations to help you figure out the difference between white hat, black hat and gray hat marketing methods and choose which approach will work best for your business.
What Is White-Hat SEO?
6 White Hat SEO Strategies You Can Learn from Black Hat SEOs
Content marketers who take a white hat approach to SEO are playing the game by Google’s rules — and there’s nothing wrong with this. In fact, if you have time to play the long game, then this is possibly the best way to go. You play it safe, and you take your time.
With this approach, quality and transparency are everything. You focus on creating high-quality content that brings massive value to your audience. You focus on building your brand and carving out your niche online with strategies that are proven to yield long-term results.
But this requires patience.
It will take time for your content to rank and for your website to build authority with the search engines. If your business is already in a very strong position in your market, then you can probably afford to take your time building out your presence online and waiting for organic search traffic to come along.
But many business owners aren’t willing to wait months or years to see results, which is why they turn to black hat methods.
What Is Black-Hat SEO?
Confessions of a Retired Black Hat SEO: 7 Crazy Tactics That Yielded Big Gains
Black hat SEOs promise you the world, and they love to show you short-term stats that make them look like the gods of the internet. They can rank a new website in a matter of weeks — maybe even days — using tactics designed to trick the search engines into sending truckloads of traffic.
They might use inexperienced writers overseas to crank out cheap, low-quality articles that are loaded up with awkward keyword combinations. This type of content is barely readable to human beings, but search engines can be fooled into sending traffic to these pages for a while.
They’ll push out spam emails to marketing lists that might not even comply with current federal and international guidelines. They spam their backlinks all over random forums, blogs and social media accounts with reckless abandon. And even though their methods don’t work nearly as well as they did a few years ago, they stick with them and simply scale them up in order to keep squeezing out some positive results to show their clients.
These black hat methods can produce short-term gains, but over time they will lead to penalties from search engines. Eventually, your traffic will dwindle down to nothing, and your website will be like an abandoned ghost town in the middle of the desert. That’s bad news for your business, but it looks great in the short run. And that’s all that matters to these types of marketers.
– fast results
– great stats
– impressive numbers
But it doesn’t last. If you plan on being in business for more than a year, then avoid black hat marketers like the plague.
What Is Gray-Hat SEO?
SEO 101: Meet the White Hats, Gray Hats, Black Hats & Asshats
Now, with gray hat SEO, you aren’t trying to manipulate search rankings and game Google into thinking that your website is more popular than it is like the black hat crowd is doing. You aren’t cutting corners on quality, and you aren’t spamming anybody. You aren’t using shady tactics for short-term gains, knowing that those tactics will eventually lead to long-term loss for your site or for your clients.
With gray hat SEO, your intentions are in the right place. You’re a white hat at heart, but you aren’t afraid to optimize your content and initiate some manual promotional tactics to give your traffic a boost.
Gray hat SEO brings together the best of both worlds. Link Building Services that utilize a middle-of-the-road approach like this will take the best practices used by white hat marketers, and they’ll combine that with specific SEO methods that are shown to work without crossing so far into the dark side as to bring on the wrath of Google. If you want to build momentum a little more quickly without sacrificing long-term results, then this is the path you want to take.
There might not be a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to online marketing. Many bloggers and affiliate marketers actually love the fly-by-night nature of black hat marketing and don’t mind churning out short-lived websites in order to generate short-term revenue.
But legitimate businesses that plan on staying around for awhile and are trying actually build a brand will likely gravitate toward white hat or even gray hat strategies. Keep the above ideas in mind when deciding for yourself how to steer your business into the digital marketing age, and don’t hesitate to do the additional homework needed to find reputable marketing agencies to help you grow your business.