Network Dynamics® – online & technology solutions

Black hat and white hat SEO

You may have heard of Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO) before, but did you know there’s good and bad SEO?  If not, we suggest you continue reading!

White Hat

White hat SEO is the art of helping your website perform in organic (natural) search results by using proven methods, systems and monitoring tools.  While there are many methods one can use to search engine optimise a website, the goal still remains the same; quality web traffic to your website.  Some of these methods include:

Page Titles - Creating descriptive titles can help Google index relevant pages.

Friendly URL’s – Nice search engine friendly links; ie) www.example.com.au/this-is-a-link rather than www.example.com.au/index.php?page=12

Inbound links - Getting other websites and directories can help boost search engine ranking.

Google currently leads the way both in terms of global usage and monitoring tools, such as Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.

Black Hat

This form of SEO is thought to “trick” search engines into indexing more keywords and content, therefore gaining your website a better ranking in search results and higher traffic.  Some of the techniques include:

Keyword stuffing – Cramming hundreds or even thousands of keywords and phrases into a page without any other content.

Invisible text – Hiding text by making it the same colour as the background; ie) white text on a white backround.  This text can be seen by search engines but not visitors.

Doorway pages – special pages created to capture search engines (not visitors) and redirect them to the main website.

This form of SEO is known in the web design world as unethical and while it may work for a short amount of time, you run a high risk of your website being banned from Google altogether.  Google and other search engines have strict guidelines as to how they index and rank websites all in the aim of providing quality content to the end user, while providing an even playing field for legitimate websites.  The moral of the story?  Avoid black hat SEO like the plague if you want your website to survive longer than a few weeks!

So what’s all this blog business anyway?

While blogging has been around for years now, it’s only in the last 12 months we’ve seen a huge increase in small businesses using them to their full potential.  If you’re wondering what a blog is, well, you’re reading one now.  It’s kind of like a newsletter, except your posts have the potential of being re-distributed and published on other websites and blogs around the world.

If your blog posts are informative and topical, people will most likely link to the posts or even submit their own comments if your blog is setup to allow visitor interaction.  Blogs also attract a great amount of search engine attention as long as you are frequently updating and adding relevant content.

So how do you start?

The best blogging platform by far is WordPress, which we specialise in developing and hosting.  While WordPress started life mainly as a blogging platform, it’s now often used as a CMS (content management system) to run both the blog and your entire website.  We can set you up with a WordPress installation and build a new website, re-build your existing website into WordPress or even add WordPress to your current website by styling it to match your current website’s theme.

Stay tuned for more helpful blogging tips and tricks in future posts.

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