Are Black Hat SEO Techniques The Big No-No?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a marketing technique that improves the volume of quality traffic to a web site (hopefully yours) from search engines. Quality traffic in this case would be from natural or organic search results. In opposition to SEO, paid inclusion of websites to search engines is called Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Either way, the higher the site appears in the search engine results, the more visitors it attracts. SEO considers how search engines work and how people search and what they search for. Ethical techniques to optimize are considered white hat. They include internal links, reciprocal links and writing content that is relevant to your site. In contrast, there are some techniques that are considered black hat and they may do more harm than good in the long run.

Link building and back links are two good ways to get traffic to your articles. Make sure that the links that you build are good quality links and that their content is relevant to your site. That will get you traffic that is interested in your product and people will not feel misled. Back links are simply links that lead back to your site. This takes work and all links are not equal. The important thing is to keep working on it and, if you decide to use reciprocal links, use them wisely. Don't put a bunch of non-related links on your site just to get back links. They won't help you in the long run. Finally, use the tools that are available to you. Google adwords is a tool to help you choose higher traffic keywords without keyword stuffing. Keep learning and listen to the experts and soon you will be too.

Black Hat techniques include link farms, keyword stuffing, and article spinning. These techniques have a derogatory reputation and they degrade the relevance of the search results and often, the user experience.

Link Farms are a group of websites that hyperlink to every other link in the group. Most are created through automated programs and services. Link farms are a form of spamming the index of a search engine called spamdexing.

Another questionable method is Keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is the act of using randomly repeated keywords over and over within your content. The web page is loaded with keywords in the meta tags and in the content. Keyword stuffing is completely outdated and adds no value to the rank of your page.

Article spinning is an attempt to manipulate the rank of a page by taking the same article and "spinning" it to avoid the duplicate content checkers. Article spinning software can corrupt the original meaning of the article and does not take into account the subtleties of the English language. Some software makes it virtually unreadable to humans.