White Hat SEO vs Black Hat SEO

While White Hat SEO techniques aim at optimizing a website with respect to search engines guidelines, Black Hat SEO seeks to bypass these rules in order to reach a quicker and most effective visibility.

White Hat SEO

As a SEO consultant in Brussels, I only White Hat SEO techniques to help my client increase their presence and visibility on the Internet. These techniques provide long-lasting qualified traffic on your website.

SEO Audit

Before implementing any SEO strategy, I always perform a SEO audit to check possible blocking factors. This is the preliminary step before the actual optimization of a website.

On-site SEO

On-site SEO refers to search engine optimization techniques that are performed on your own website or page, and are therefore termed “on-site”.

Off-site SEO

Off-site SEO refers to search engine optimization techniques that are not performed on your own website or page, and are therefore termed “off-site.” Typically, it involves the implementation of a link building campaign to generate backlinks to your website.

Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO involves that are used to get higher search engine rankings in an unethical manner. These black hat SEO techniques usually include one or more of the following characteristics:

• Breaking search engine rules,
• creating a poor user experience directly because of the Black Hat SEO techniques used on the website,
• and presenting content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.

Nowadays, there are two tendancies regarding Black Hat SEO:

1. autogeneration of content, generally rewrited, to appear as unique and thus relevant for search engines,
2. and the autogenerationof backlinks through the use of spamware (i.e. automated comment spam from bots) .

Black Hat SEO techniques generally provide short-term visibility in terms of search engine rankings, but if you are discovered utilizing these spammy techniques on your Website, you run the risk of being seriously penalized by search engines.

Grey Hat SEO

Finally, Grey Hat SEO techniques, those that are neither really white nor black hat, include purchase of links and parasite hosting. While such techniques can be very effective, it really has be used in an elegant manner if you don’ t want to get a spam report.

Overview of SEO techniques

Below is a diagram illustrating the scope of the different SEO techniques.

As you can see, high value White Hat SEO techniques are the following:

• on-site optimization based on keyword research,
• linkbait through the production of high-quality content with a viral potential.

Backlinks will naturally come from using the above mentioned techniques.

Combining SEO with SMO techniques

Very important, I strongly advise to combine SEO with SMO (Social Media Optimization) techniques. Going on social media through the creation of a blog or using a microblogging tool like Twitter can help you build a strong reputation online.