White hat, Gray Hats and Black Hats on SEO (and other species)

In this Online world things may work out or not for your company depending of the kind of SEO you choose to get done for your website and or Social Networks.It is important that by the time you're ready to take this steps (since sometimes it may be a costly but worth asset for your business.), that you know at least some of what kind of service you may be looking for and what results should you get.

So the question many people: Why so many hats? White, Gray Black? Does it really matter?
Does it makes a difference? Read more have a better idea before you choose to get SEO done for yourself.

1. White Hat SEO:

This is the ethical SEO, the most logical and first one anyone starting would follow, is all about best practices. Meaning following all google's, Bing's, Yext's standards to be properly ranked, using the right keywords and lots of organic on your SMM.

I'm not going to deny that White Hat SEO, asides from being the Search Engine Elite's friend, it takes longer than any other technique, but trust me, it is worth it.

Here's some White Hat SEO practices:

Content

Researching relevant keywords, both short ail and long tail keywords
Including keywords naturally in page titles, headings, link anchor text, other page content, and alt tags
Studying analytics reports and fine-tuning the content to further optimize it for targeted keywords and to help direct traffic to relevant pages
Adding fresh content regularly

Coding

Using correct HTML markup (for example, heading tags) so that search engines can identify headings and other types of content correctly
Making sure that all the code is valid (or at least won't stop search engine bots)
Creating site maps so that every page is linked to and search engine bots can crawl every page
Using CSS to separate content from markup and thus increase keyword density by having less markup to crawl

Linking

Creating quality content that other people will want to link to
Asking to have directories and other relevant websites link to the site
Optimizing pages for social media in the hopes of attracting social media links
Arranging for link exchanges with relevant sites (considered by some to be gray hat SEO)

2. Black Hat SEO:

So time to talk about the "Bad Guys", not really but yes! Black Hat SEO is a lot more risky than any other, since various techniques are used to trick search engine robots, and to increase traffic in malicious or viral ways. Also Black Hat SEO over stuff with keywords, a fatal decision, since your rank can drop and last months to get back to the tops.

Trying or going too over the top doing Black Hat SEO may result in blocking, banning and worst is that any SEO work you do lasts for years coming back at you to bite your "Behind" every time.

I do not recommend these techniques since I believe all is good ol' hard work, but some people choose to do so.

Following are some Black Hat SEO practices:

Content

Keyword stuffing
- Overusing keywords in comment tags, alt tags, and meta tags
- Placing keywords in hidden text (hidden from people, that is) by making their font color the same color as the page background
- Overusing keywords in visible text, to the point where their repetition is apparent to readers

Deceptive content

Doorway or gateway pages: pages that are stuffed with keywords but that only search engines see because people are redirected to the page with the real content
Cloaking: displaying different content to search engines than to people by identifying visitors via IP or via other methods

Linking

Link farms: pages with unrelated links solely for the purpose of creating more links to target pages
Spamming forums, blogs, and other social media sites with links (search engines might not penalize sites for this, but it's considered unethical)

3.Gray Hat SEO

So this would be our middle man, the Mr. Cool guy, that takes more risks than a White Hat , but won't get your site banned from search engines as a Black Hat could. They may be questionable in SEO techniques but not in the same intensity as Black Hat. But since this Industry everything changes so fast, what may be Gray today, may be Black hat tomorrow.

Here's some Gray Hat SEO techniques:

Content

Having a keyword density that's high enough to sound unnatural but not at the level of black hat keyword stuffing
Publishing duplicate content at different sites

Links

Link building where relevance is less important
Planned three-way linking
Using paid links

Remember if it sounds too good to be true, it may be. No SEO is done over the night, once i again it is based on Hard Team work that takes time. I hope this post could add some more into your bucket knowledge.

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