There have been a lot of news stories of late about private wheel clamping businesses. One in particular mentioned a young man who had his motor car clamped outside his own residence. He had a parking permit but unfortunately it had fallen down from the windscreen so was not visible to the clampers, and even though he was able to show this to them he still was required to pay three hundred pounds to get the clamp removed. The observation was made that the actions of the clamping company were legal but were they ethical. This real life scenario really helps express the different practises used to promote websites on the internet by a Search Engine Optimisation Company. They are called correspondingly Black Hat and White Hat optimisation.
The two names come from a reference to black and white American westerns, where the bad guy usually wore a black hat and the good guy wore a white one. Therefore Black Hat optimisation is the bad guy, it’s not necessarily illegal but it is unethical. Some examples of Black Hat Online Marketing are keyword stuffing, cloaking and doorway pages, all of these methods are used by Online Marketing businesses to get an instantaneous financial return from the website and the fact that the site will most often end up being banned is of little importance. Keyword Stuffing involves placing repeating sequences of keywords in both the meta tags or actual content of the site. Cloaking is a strategy that is most often run by server side scripting and it presents a different version of a internet page to a search engine spider than the one that is presented in the website browser. This hidden internet page will contain repetitions of keywords. Doorway pages work in a similar way, but since most search engines now discover and remove from their listings any doorway pages they find, most doorway pages tend to just try and trick the searcher into clicking a link for redirection. As already mentioned all these methods will result in much better Search Engine Placement in the short term, but will most certainly destroy a fine online reputation in the process.
The good guy is White Hat Online Marketing; this is the ethical way of publicising your web page and whilst Black Hat Online Marketing is primarily aimed at the search engines, White Hat Online Marketing considers the human audience. It is a long term strategy that follows very closely the search engines rules and policies. Some examples of White Hat Online Marketing are keyword analysis, back linking, link building and writing content for human readers. All of these methods are very much more intensive and time consuming than their Black Hat equivalents. Keyword analysis involves interacting with a client to find out all you can about their company to draw up a keyword list, then using the different search engine analytical tools choosing the best to use for their internet site. Both back linking and link building build page ranking in a similar way by linking a internet site to others offering similar products or services. The strategy of writing content for human audiences it the most time consuming of all the White Hat systems and is definitely not used by the unethical Black Hat fraternity.