No matter whether it is black hat or white hat search engine optimization techniques that you are considering using, the fact is that SEO never stands still. As web site design evolves and the search engine spiders become ever more sophisticated and ‘smart’, the SEO tactics that are most effective develop over time as well. For that reason, things that might have worked a year or two ago will not necessarily work now.

As an example, a ‘classic’ black hat technique that used to be very effective was to take the keywords or phrases that you just discovered and add them to the pages of your site, but in text that was the same color as your page background.

In this way, your human visitors could not see them, and so their viewing experience while visiting your page was not disturbed. However, the search engine spiders could see them, and so they would index those pages for the ‘invisible’ keywords that were included on your page, and that would drive visitors to your site.

As far as the search engine people were concerned, this was cheating their system because you were not doing anything that improved the quality of the experience for your visitor, while you were pulling in visitors that, as far as they were concerned, you did not ‘merit’.

Now the spiders that the search engines send out to your site can ‘see’ whether the text on your page is visible or not, so this tactic no longer works. Incidentally, if you are interested in knowing what search engine spiders are visiting your site, and how often, you can find out from the stats programs that are built into the management panel of your site:

And, if you don’t have access to such information through your own site management system, you can add the Google Analytics code to your pages for free, and that will tell you.

Even if you are going to adopt black hat SEO techniques to build your pages, not everything that you do is going to be stuff that is likely to upset the good folk at Google, Yahoo and BING. In fact, there are many things that you should do that are totally acceptable to the search engines, because they are designed to do little more than make their jobs easier!

These strictly white hat SEO tactics include:

• Making sure that you site has an accurate site map, and that the map is linked to from your home page. This helps the search engine spiders navigate their way around your site easily, and that ensures that every page should get indexed. There are many sites that allow you to create good quality HTML and text site maps for free (here and here are a couple of examples), and the advantage of using them is that the HTML coding they produce is likely to be accurate and search engine friendly as well.
• The major search engines like to see various pages clearly linked to from any sales page that is featured on your site. These would include a ‘Terms of Service’ page, an ‘Earnings Disclaimer’ and a ‘Contact’ form as well. Leaving these off your site means that your page is definitely not as search engine friendly as it should be.
• Make certain that the internal linking structure of your site works properly, and that everything links to where it should go. This will again help the search engine spiders find where they are going when they visit your site, and ensures that all of the pages that you want to be found are found.
• Sometimes, you may be using stylized pages (e.g. a self hosted Wordpress blog) for your page. If so, make sure that it does not have ‘nofollow’ tags enabled, as that would mean that the spiders did not follow any links from that page. Instead, you need the ‘dofollow’ tags to be in place, and to do this in Wordpress you can simply download and install the ‘dofollow plug-in’.
• Each page must have an appropriate Title that contains the keyword phrase which you are targeting in the HTML (or whatever coding format you are using) of the page.
• In your HTML coding, there should be a meta-description, as this is the phrase that appears beneath the Title of your site in the search engine results pages:

• On the visible page, there should be a Headline that tells the visitor what is happening on your page. This is possibly the most important part of the page copy, and you should therefore take time to get it right, and to ensure that it contains your key phrase. This should be in H1 or H2 font size as well.
• Beneath that there should be a sub-headline that adds to the description that you began ‘building’ in the headline.
• The on-page density of your keyword phrase should be between 4-8%. Anything less than that and you are not optimizing your page for that keyword phrase, anything more than that will make the search engine spiders believe that you might be ‘keyword stuffing’ your page, which was another black hat technique that people used to use that no longer works.

As suggested earlier, all of these SEO techniques are perfectly acceptable white hat SEO tactics that any sensible web master must adopt to ensure that their web pages are found and properly indexed by the search engine spiders.

Tags: Black Hat SEO, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, White Hat SEO

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 12th, 2010 at 12:43 am and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.