Ensure that Your SEO Tactic is a White Hat Tactic

In the quest for greater viewership and more ‘hits’, websites use a variety of means designed to attract online users. A strategy commonly used by webmasters everywhere is search engine optimization (SEO), which aims to improve a particular website’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).

SEO practices can be roughly classified as either ‘white hat’ or ‘black hat’, although only ‘white hat’ practices are considered acceptable by search engines. White hat practices are ‘fair’ tactics that help enhance an internet user’s experience. Some of these tactics involve creating unique, relevant website content and sharing links with reputable websites, employing methods that comply with the parameters set by search engines’ algorithms.

Black hat SEO, on the other hand, circumvents these parameters through such tactics as creating spam content (i.e., low quality content meant to be produced in large numbers) and farming links (i.e., obtaining numerous links from other websites, regardless if they’re relevant or not). Search engines, especially Google, have since taken steps to penalize websites that use black hat SEO.

Webmasters still need to be careful though, as they might accidentally engage in what are considered black hat SEO practices. For instance, posting two copies of the same content in two different webpages could count as content duplication, which could be construed as a violation of acceptable SEO practices.