March 5th, 2010 by Nick

It is one of the persisting myths of SEO that it is a discipline that compromises quality just with a view to attracting a search engine’s ‘bots’. In fact the opposite is true, and ‘white-hat’ SEO is actually a great way to not only bolster your page ranking, but to create some informative and fulfilling content – so everybody wins!

Firstly, an important distinction needs to be made between ‘black-hat’ and ‘white-hat’ SEO, as whilst they have similar aims, they are immensely different. ‘Black Hat’ uses every trick in the book in order to increase the ranking of a page in Google; however it is essentially a self-defeating process. Specifically black hat search engine optimization seeks to reap all the advantages of optimization without essentially giving something back to the user; therefore its techniques are often crude. So, for example, black hat will concentrate on keyword density rather than content quality with a view to tricking Google’s page crawling bots into thinking that it offers relevance and quality. Ultimately, these ‘black hat’ techniques are not only unethical, but they are in fact flawed; and Google’s algorithms are actually engineered to omit pages that are essentially ’spam’. And even if a ‘black hat’ page does make it to a prominent ranking, it’s only a matter of time before it’s is noticed and eviscerated.

If you want to increase your page ranking in a permanent and ethical way, the solution is simple – ‘white hat’ search engine optimisation! As the name suggests this is the ethical side of optimisation, which is not only accepted by Google but it is actively encouraged! In our rush to be ethical with our optimisation, we shouldn’t forget our aims, however and whilst quality should always be integral to our endeavours, for SEO to be successful you need to pretty clever along with it!

For example, whilst it is true that websites should have considerable visual impact, and appealing design features, you should remember that a search engine’s website crawling bots are looking for valuable words, not clever flash animations or the like, and therefore if you want to ensure a decent page ranking you might need to change what it there currently and start incorporating some good old fashioned text!

Whilst you might think that this is a compromise in terms of quality, it needn’t be and a blog section on your website will not only be a boon to those all important bots but can really add an extra dimension to the entire.  Submitting your blogs to social media sites can also help your off page SEO efforts by building links. The key to this of course is to incorporate copywriting that balances integrity with keyword density!

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