What is White Hat/Black Hat SEO?

With the rapid onset of digitization and billions of users flocking to search engines to find products, search engine marketing (SEM) has become a crucial tool that every digital marketer must use. Search engine optimization is the organic part of SEM, which helps marketers reach their target audience without investing highly in ads.

Search engines have web crawlers that index a website to determine which content would be the most helpful to the visitors. They do this by assessing several factors. For example, Google analyzes over 200 factors to determine website ranks. The job of SEO experts is to curate a website’s content so that the site ends up in the top few search engine results for a given set of keywords.

Most successful experts do this by following the search engine best practices. What these experts do is known as white hat SEO. However, some web admins try to manipulate the algorithms of search engines through unethical and unapproved practices. These underhanded practices are called black hat SEO.

Difference Between White Hat and Black Hat SEO

1. Audience

White hat SEO focuses more on the human audience. White hat SEO specialists ensure that the kind of content on the website is valuable to the visitors. This ensures a lower bounce rate and facilitates link-building.

Black hat SEO focuses more on the search engine while giving minimum regard to whether the website content is valuable to human visitors or not. The main aim of black hat SEO is to exploit the algorithm of search engines to get a higher index value.

2. Keywords

53% of all organic traffic comes from organic search. Keywords are one of the major factors that influence these searches. They communicate the relevance of a website or blog to web crawlers for a specific search query. White hat SEO uses keywords in a natural organic manner as well as meta tags and descriptions. Hence, the content is easy to read and helpful.

On the other hand, black hat SEO users engage in practices like keyword stuffing. It is a webspam technique in which the website’s meta tags, anchor text, or visible content is overloaded with irrelevant keywords in order to improve ranking.

3. Links

White hat SEO consists of relevant internal and external links, whereas black hat SEO consists of irrelevant backlinks. Black hat SEO webmasters exchange backlinks to increase the ranking of their website.

4. Longevity

While black hat SEO may give faster results, it cannot last. Search engines are becoming increasingly intelligent and strict. Indulging in black hat SEO can result in your website being heavily penalized and even banned from search engine results. It is hence important to only follow SEO best practices while optimizing the content on your website.

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Crust is an open-source low-code platform that can help you tailor-make the tools you need to boost your sites’ SEO. You can make apps that can help you keep track of backlinks and keywords. You can also use Crust’s automation tools to schedule uploads. Try a demo of the amazing CRM app to see what wonders it can do for your SEO.

5 replies
  1. Sophia
    Sophia says:

    This is a place where you can find information that you can trust, and understand as you observe your importance.
    This information is very helpful for your visitors, which will provide a lot of good information to the visitors of your website.

    Thank You

    Reply
  2. Balaji Saravanan
    Balaji Saravanan says:

    Black Hat SEO is a deceptive way of making keywords rank on Google suck like clocking, Backdoor pages, etc. If Google finds out if you are using Black Hat SEO then it will punish you by penalizing your website. Thank you for the wonderful article.

    Reply
  3. Avril
    Avril says:

    On a wide scale, I see SEO turning into a standardized promoting strategy, the same way TV, radio, and print are generally considered showcasing strategies.

    Reply

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