Put Your Black Hat On
It is all in how you wear it.
Knowing the Dark Arts
The best SEOs out there – and by the best I mean the ones that are well employed or making a killing in the freelance arena during our current economic situation – are masters of the Dark Arts. Place an SEO Newbie in a room with experts and you’ll see a smirk come across their face when the discussion starts to involve terms like “White Hat”, “Black Hat” and “Gray Hat”. Given that most of the SEOs I know can come off as nerdy, the newbie could well think they zoned out for a brief period of time and have suddenly been immersed in a Magic the Gathering conversation.
White Hat SEO represents all that is good in the industry. It is about playing fair and doing things the right way to build traffic, create conversions and rankings for your clients. It means diligent on-page work through unique content, proper URLs, Title Tags and navigation that is useful to humans as well as the engines. White Hat SEO means creating links by utilizing social networking and writing blog posts that are so utterly brilliant your industry friends can’t help but throw you a link or two.
I only endorse White Hat SEO and I would only work with fellow SEOs that build traffic in this manner.
SEO is not unlike most industries in that there are people that do things the right way and there are people that go about their job in a less than right way. Those would be the evil-doers – the Black Hats. The cloakers and the deceivers. Those that try to trick the search engines and dodge the penalties that will surely arise should they get their butts busted.
Real SEOs Go Both Ways
If I am interviewing an engineer for a project, one of the initial questions I ask is for them to share all the latest trends in Black Hat SEO. You can imagine this takes people by surprise and they get the look on their face they’ve just been busted on To Catch a Predator. What I am actually getting at is the best in the business are as well versed in the “illegal” tactics as they are in White Hat because that is how you stay ahead of the competition.
An overwhelming majority of SEO engineers practice White Hat. That doesn’t mean those utilizing Black Hat cannot seriously mess up your world and it is critical to know those tactics so that you can assert dominance on the SERPs.
The best of the best know what is going on with both sides. They stay ahead of the competition by knowing what the cloakers are plotting and then go about their job in the correct way. White Hat produces long-term, positive results that will grow a client’s business. Black Hat is a short-term, desperation heave to try and gain traction in the engines. They’ll be found out eventually and then it is the client’s site that suffers and has to regain favor.