SEO: White hat, black hat, backlinks, oh my
This past week, my Social Media class had the pleasure of listening to Daniel Monday, the Chief Operating Officer of Slamdot, talk to us about the importance of SEO, or search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is when one makes their website easier to find through internet searches using keywords. These keywords will make your website appear higher on the search list when you do a search for specific terms.
According to moz.com, an SEO consulting company, “SEO is a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results. SEO encompasses both the technical and creative elements required to improve rankings, drive traffic, and increase awareness in search engines. There are many aspects to SEO, from the words on your page to the way other sites link to you on the web. Sometimes SEO is simply a matter of making sure your site is structured in a way that search engines understand.”
There are several ways to improve your search engine optimization. The more ethical ways to improve your SEO are called white hat. There are also less ethical ways, also known as black hat. White hat techniques focus on your human audience and follow the search engine policies. If a website focuses on providing relevant content and organic ranking, it is considered to be optimized using white hat practices. Link building is used to lead back to your own website. These links are placed on other places when you share information and content with other sites, and when clicked, will take the user back to your own site. Search engines such as Google take this into consideration when ranking sites for authoritative content.
According to an article written by Vangie Beal, “Black hat SEO refers to the use of aggressive SEO strategies, techniques and tactics that focus only on search engines and not a human audience, and usually does not obey search engines guidelines.” Black hat search engine optimization is the practice of creating content only to generate traffic, not to benefit the human audience that may be viewing the content. It is pretty much like using certain hashtags on Twitter and Instagram just to gain followers, and not providing relevant or useful content.
Search engine optimization is an extremely important part of promoting your own website or content, and there are several ways to accomplish it. In order to maintain the integrity, authority, and reliability of your brand, white hat search engine optimization is really the only way to go. All aspects of communication integrity are important if you plan on establishing a trusted brand.