As spring 2012 rolled into summer, SEO services sounded like fashion advisors, telling us all to change out our ‘black hats’ for ‘white hat’ practices. If you didn’t take the advice seriously and make changes to the content on your online presence, you have more than likely noticed a significant decrease in the number of visitors to your website. The loss of page rank due to outdated optimization practices will have a direct negative on your profits. You can’t afford to waste any time in making the changes needed to keep your business in front of your potential customers.
What is Black Hat?
Black Hat is considered web spam. It was adopted as a way to trick search engines that looked for keywords and back links to rank the pages. As website owners tried to add fresh content to their sites that would be noticed by the search engine bots, they tended to focus more on page views than on the value of the content of the page. Many times a piece would be so stuffed with keywords that the substance of the information was difficult to understand. In many cases, there was no information that had any value to the reader at all.
Black Hat practices seemed to work. Potential customers found the site and many followed the call to action and completed a purchase or requested additional information.
The use of back links is also an area that will bring potential business to your website. Again, Black Hat practices focused on the number of back links that they could publish online. Many times the links appeared in articles and on sites that had nothing in common to the website that the back link led to.
White Hat
The changes in the way that search engines index web pages is forcing the adjustments to pieces of content that are starting to show up on the web. Quality content that fits with the theme of the website is now highly ranked. The keywords that are used have to be used in such a way as to make the information readable and understandable, letting the user as well as the search engine bot identify the information that they will find on the site. The over use of keywords will lower the rank of the pages, so successful content writers have quickly adapted to find better ways to describe services and products, which often make the article more interesting.
The placement of back links is also changing. The users can more easily find the valuable content that they want because the links in the article lead to additional information in the areas that they are interested in.
Since most people who use a search engine usually will choose the link that they will visit in the first two pages of web results, page ranking is very important. Make sure that your SEO services utilize the ever changing methods used by the top search engines to keep your business in front of the largest number of potential customers as possible.
