White Hat SEO refers to any practice that improves your search performance on a search engine results page SERP while maintaining the integrity of your website and staying within the search engines' terms of service. These tactics stay within the bounds as defined by Google. It uses techniques that focuses human audience which are in accordance with the policies and guidelines. It includes:
1.Quality Content
Creating quality content is important because it shows the search engines that your site is unique and appropriate to display. Content that targets a strong, related keyword phrase on each page wins every time. Researching keywords that are both short and long tail and are relevant to your site is necessary to do as well. Be sure to include keywords naturally in headings, link anchor texts and page titles. Furthermore, it is important to add new relevant content regularly. The more content-rich your site is, the better as it will appear to be more valuable to the search engines, human visitors and webmasters who would most likely link to your site. Although creating quality content may be time consuming, it will be well worth it in the long run.
2. Titles and Meta Data
Providing pages with proper titles and Meta data is essential. Engines now regard them as less important, it’s still important to use them and use them properly. Titles however still carry a lot of weight and when we think of semantic mark-up it is obvious why. The title of anything is a declaration as to what the content might be, so make sure your page titles are a true representation of the content of the page.
For example, a page with a Meta title of "White Hat SEO - White Hat SEO methods" could have this first paragraph of content: White hat SEO is the key to effective search engine optimization. If you're not using white hat SEO methods, none of your SEO techniques will be effective.
3. Keyword Research
Create your website with keywords and key phrases in mind. Research keywords and key phrases you think people might use to find your site. Single words are not always the most effective target, try multi-word phrases that are much more specific to your product/service and you’ll be targeting end users that are much more likely to want what you are offering.
Use the keywords and key phrases you’ve identified effectively throughout your website. Assign each page 2-3 of the keywords you’ve identified and use the keywords throughout all the important elements of the page. Those are,
Title
Meta Description
Meta Keywords
Heading Elements
Title Tag
Links
4. Quality Inbound Links
Having inbound links to your website can be likened to having a vote for the good but there are good links and bad links so therefore votes for the good and votes that are bad. Good links are links from other web pages that are regarded highly by the search engines and are contextually relevant to the content of your page. Bad links are links from web pages that aren't regarded highly or potentially banned by search engines and have no relevance to the content of your page.
Conclusion
Always apply White hat techniques because it is risk-free and good for long term business.
Black Hat SEO
Black hat SEO is the use of techniques that are unacceptable to search engines to boost a page's position in search results. These techniques are intended to trick search engines into giving pages higher positions in search results, and they have no benefit to site visitors. The goal is to improve search engine result positions no matter what it takes to do it.
Black hat SEO techniques are used for two reasons: They work — until search engines find out about them and they don't work.Some people don't understand that black hat SEO techniques can get their sites penalized by or banned from search engines.Even if search engines can't detect the black hat SEO techniques, competitors of sites that employ black hat SEO techniques can spot them and do report them to search engines. Even seo agency can suffer from it.
These practices are against the search engine's terms of service and can result in the site being banned from the search engine and affiliate sites. A list of tactics and strategies employed by black hat SEO practitioners have been openly denounced on Google's Webmaster Guidelines and Bing's Webmaster Guidelines. It includes
1. Hidden Content
Top of our list of black hat SEO techniques is hidden content. Hidden content comes in many guises but the basic principle is that within the code for the site there will be content stuffed with keywords, this content will not be visible to the end user of the site.One way of doing this is by using comment tags.
Comment tags look like this :
<!– Comment Tag –>
The real purpose of comment tags is for developers to add in useful reminders within their code explaining what that piece of code does. Here’s an example of the comment tag being used correctly,
<!– Search engine optimization-->
Here’s an example of a comment tag being used incorrectly in a bid to promote a hypothetical page targeting search engine optimization :
<!—Search engine optimization, SEO, professional search engine optimization company, spamming search engines, black hat ,white hat, gray hat , keyword ,because ,how –>
2. Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is the practice of filling a web page with keywords or numbers so that the search engine will think the page is relevant to the search. Usually these keywords are irrelevant to the actual site. Sometimes these keywords are hidden so that they are not seen by the user, but are still scanned by the search engine. Keyword stuffing can result in poor user experience and ultimately harm your site’s ranking.
3. Cloaking
Cloaking refers to the technique of showing different content to crawlers than that of what you show to your users. One form of cloaking is using various keywords, titles, and descriptions that are entirely different from what your actual content is really about. There is a high chance that if a search engine determines that the site is cloaking, it will be banned.
4. Meta Keyword Stuffing
Meta Keywords should be a short list of words that inform of the main focus of the page. Meta keywords have been so misused in the past that there are few if any search engines that take any heed of them.
Here’s an example of the meta keywords being used in the correct manner :
Here’s an example of the meta keywords tag being used incorrectly for a page promoting a restaurant called “MadeUp” :
<meta name=”keywords” content=” free website, seoranking ,up your website in two day, ”>
5. Doorway Pages
Doorway is also called Gateway pages. Doorway page are pages designed for search engines and not for the end user. They are basically 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 engine spiders are being enhanced continually to detect these pages and will get ignored or worse still, flag your site up as being spam and ban you all together.
6. Link Farming
The idea behind link farming is that you exchange links with other websites to boost your site's rank in search results. Search engines like Google examine how many sites are linking to yours when determining rank.With a link farm, you've traded your link with many sites for the sole purpose of increasing your site's search rank. In effect, you're trying to fool the search engine into thinking your site is more popular than it really is.
7. Link Buying and Link Exchange
Link buying is the act of purchasing links from another site to give you a link to your website in order to get a link to your website. These links are intended to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google so it appears higher. Link exchange programs are programs where one can exchange links with others. Excessive link exchanging is forbidden by Google.
8. Article Spinning
Article spinning is a technique in which website owners post a unique version of relevant content on their site by rewriting existing articles and replacing parts for a slightly different perspective on the topic. Article spinning reduces the quality of the original article no matter how it is done. Article spinning also limits the places that you can put your articles in the future.
9.Paid links
Donate for charity, software developers etc. Many of them display links to those who donate.
10. Duplicate content
Copy a substantial amount of content from another website, with or without permission.and modified them apply under own site.
11. Social Networking Spam
Target demographics on social networking sites and message people with advertisements. Network, find people with similar interests, and exchange contact information when there is mutual interest.
Example: "Hello Frank, we met at the Web Design Meetup last week. I like what you had to say about accessibility and usability. What was that site you mentioned that had the list of usability studies?"
12. Fake news
Create real news on official looking sites for real event.You can even do itin print.Works great for all kinds of activism related topics.
13. Map spam
Instead of faking multiple addresses all over the place just to appear on Google Maps and Local why don’t you simply create an affiliate network of real life small business owners with shops and offices who, for a small amount of money, are your representatives there? All they need to do is to collect your mail from Google and potential clients.
14. Invisible Text
This is the placing of keywords in white text on a white background in order to attract search engine spiders ,do by many language like HTML, CSS, XML etc.
Conclusion
Black hat techniques have a lot of risks , if google's search algorithm finds that you apply black hat techniques it may block your site or drop down your site ranking .
Gray Hat SEO
Gray hat SEO is SEO techniques that take more risks than white hat SEO techniques but aren't likely to get your site banned from search engines (although a search engine penalty could result). They're questionable SEO techniques but not in the same category as black hat SEO techniques. However, what's considered gray hat SEO today might be black hat SEO next year.
Site/page tagging: The meta tags that are included in the coding of your web site are essential to having that site listed properly in a search engine. Tags to which you should pay specific attention are the title tags and description tags, because these are the most important to a search engine
Page content: If your content is stale, search engines could eventually begin to ignore your site in favor of a site that has fresher content. There are exceptions to this generalization, however.And one exception is if your content is, by nature, very rich but not very dynamic. Because of the usefulness of the content, your site will probably continue to rank well. But it’s a difficult case to determine. In most cases, fresh content is better.
Site links: Site links are essential in SEO. Crawlers and spiders look for the links into and out of your site in order to traverse your site and collect data on each URL. However, they also look for those links to be in-context, meaning the link must come from or lead to a site that is relevant to the page that is being indexed. Broken links tend to be a large problem when it comes to search engine ranking, so be sure to check that links are still working during the assessment process.
Site map: This site map is an XML-based document, at the root of your HTML, that contains information (URL, last updated, relevance to surrounding pages, and so on) about each of the pages within a site. Using this XML site map will help to ensure that even the deep pages within your site are indexed by search engines. If you don’t have a site map, you should create one. If you do have one, make sure it’s accurate and up to date.