For the last couple of days I've been reviewing ActiveRain a bit and reading many of the SEO related blogs there. It seems that most of the SEO commentary is relating to blogging as the primary vehicle for generating traffic to a website. I did read a bit of a blog from Mary McKnight who definitely does a bit of blogging on ActiveRain as well as I'm sure other places as well and she had a post on Black Hat SEO. Anyway I thought I would post a bit on Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO.

First of all I wouldn't term it Black Hat vs. White Hat. I would look at it a bit more from an organic perspective of what works and what doesn't. Blogging aka Content is critical for any SEO strategy to be effective. If you don't deliver on the content relative to the ways people are finding your site Google and the other search engines will figure it out. The bottom line is make sure that your content matches the message you have given the Search Engines when you do your SEO work.

Backlinks is also a critical element however if your back links are from Casino sites or pharmacy sites and you are a real estate website you are confusing the search engines. Make sure that your back links back up your content. As a real estate professional you want links back from other real estate professionals. Also don't ignore local content providers as well.

Build up a newsletter following. By bringing people back to your site even if its from emailing out a newsletter this yields traffic and the Toolbars which Google and Yahoo provide give them valuable information relating to how popular your website is. If you can get people returning to your site time and time again you will be more relevant then your competition. I would recommend that any newsletter only tease the client while having the balance of the content on your own website.

Don't be a link farm. Now this relates to back links. However you don't want to hand out valuable real estate on your website for links to other sites that are unrelated. Who you link to reflects on you. As a real estate website linking out to a coffee website (no matter how good their coffee is) will reduce your relevancy. The only proviso is if it is a local coffee company which lists on their site references to the community both you and the coffee company are in and they are linking back to you.

Change up your content from time to time. Though not as critical as some of the other items above, changing up the content and the look and feel of your site will create a bit of buzz. Remember the GE study about making minor changes to the work environment. By making minor changes you can increase your stickiness and most likely your lead capture.

Things that can get you in trouble:

Hidden Content - Using content the same color as the background. You need to make sure that there is contrast between the background colors and the text color. I haven't seen a site get caught personally for this but you should be able to write content that you can display that will help you and not hurt you. One proviso is frames. Google suggests the use of the noframes tag and including content from your frames in that tag. You might get some heat from SEO people who call it hidden text, however I can tell you that it isn't penalized, however do make sure that the noframes text follows the content of your actual site.

Spamming Weblogs... Okay I've done this in the past and again didn't get in trouble for it. I've changed my way (basically I figured out how to do it better and faster ethically). However back about five years ago spamming weblogs was touted as a way to get a rapid amount of links. We had one site that we owned that got blacklisted by Yahoo for the practice. Obviously you don't want to get blacklisted by any search engine if you can help it... BTW: This is the only time we have been blacklisted for any practice and we've tried a lot of stuff over the years.

Labels: SEO Strategies, Website Design