Shades of Grey: What Color is Your SEO?

The recent debate in the SEO circle seems to be regarding the color of your hat, your SEO hat that it. Whether your techniques are ethical or unethical is the topic of this debate. Most SEOs still firmly stand by traditional, search engine guidelines friendly techniques. While still many believe in generating fast, far reaching results in the shortest possible time. It is up to you to decide which bandwagon you would wish to jump on.

Ebony Black

Most black hat SEOs believe that as long as they are providing results the question of ethics should seldom worry anybody. They claim that if we are all experts at SEO then why this debate regarding the ethics of SEO arises? All this debate about the color of your SEO is creating relevant search traffic for these terms.

A website that has been promoted for about a week using black hat SEO is making a couple of thousand dollars in a little over that much time. So who cares if your SEO is black hat, hard hat, party hat or white hat? There are certain business techniques which could fall into the ambit of 'unethical' yet are valid by law. Nobody debates their implementation.

Is SEO not a viable business venture? Promoting your business on the web creates a business avenue in itself. So what if the means to the end is questionable, who is asking all the questions? And aren’t the ends being ultimately and effectively achieved.

White as snow

White hat SEO cannot be defined as SEO which strictly adheres to search engine guidelines. They generally do what suits their human visitors best. White hat SEO seeks to create a wholesome user experience i.e. users find useful, relevant information on the web site that they can use and pass on.

White hat SEO techniques also, give effective results; but they may just take a longer time to deliver. These techniques are held in higher regard with the SEO fraternity. And your work with regards to SEO is quite visible to peers and your clients, in general. This helps maintain a standard within the industry.

Elementary difference

The fundamental difference between white hat SEO and black hat SEO is that white hat SEOs treat search engines like pals, or they ignore them. Their aim is to rank high with search engines but it is directed towards the target audience. Black hat SEOs on the other hand tend to concentrate on search engines alone. Every tool and trick the employ (like hidden text and doorway pages) is directed at manipulating search engine spiders and achieving higher rankings.

Both black hat techniques and white hat techniques generate short term and long term results for clients, whether results are measured in terms of rankings, traffic, conversion or profit. But it is the ultimate intention that eventually decides their ethical or unethical nature - whether you seek to manipulate search engine algorithm and achieve almost overnight dramatic results or create an experience for every visitor of every page of your web site.

Search engine optimization techniques that are designed to deceive search engines and are not justified by the content the visitors see on the page can be termed as unethical. This manipulation reduces the relevancy of the web page to the search term and hence, reduces the quality and utility of search engines and their listings. This in turn, hampers the quality and utility of the web as a whole. The responsibility lies on all - the site owners, the SEOs, and the searchers to value the Internet as a resource and maintain a sort of decorum on the web. Deception and manipulation cannot lead to this result, though, it may lead to many more exciting results.

All this talk about the color, size, fabric and dimensions of your SEO hat is quite futile. All said and done, it is up to you to decide whether you wish to employ [insert color here] hat SEO or [insert color here] hat SEO.

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