White and Black Hat SEO: What You Should Know

Traffic is the lifeblood of your website or blog. Without traffic, you don’t have something to convert into profit. Thus, we almost do everything to get traffic from search engines, social media, and from anywhere that can refer visitors to our site. Social media places, such as Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Reddit, and Google+ are referring traffic to this blog. However, it’s still the search engines that brings the majority of visitors to this site. And unlike traffic from social media that are erratic, traffic from search engines, particularly Google, are consistent.

As of this post, our blog receives more than a hundred thousand visitors per month, and almost 90% of them are coming from search engines. We receive massive traffic from Facebook and Stumbleupon, but they are irregular. They only come when something on our blog becomes viral.

No matter how hot is the social media, we still owe our traffic from the search engines, especially from Google. Thus, we can say that SEO (search engine optimization) is still the best way to get constant traffic to your website. Unless of course you have millions of fans or followers on Facebook and Twitter like the world’s most famous celebrities.

Speaking of implementing SEO on this blog, we’re talking about something many optimizers called White Hat SEO. But I just said something because I personally don’t agree on the term “White Hat SEO”. The reason is that SEO is already understood to be White Hat. Saying White Hat SEO is like saying “White Hat White Hat SEO”. Confusing, isn’t it? I mean it’s already an overuse of terms. On the other hand, a Black Hat SEO is not an SEO. Black Hat SEO is not search engine optimization – it is search engine devastation! Black Hat SEO is like saying “Black Hat White Hat SEO”. I hope you get what I mean.

Many optimizers are still debating on what’s white and what’s black. Some SEO even use the term Grey Hat, and some use the term Blue Hat. For me, SEO is just a common sense. If you don’t optimize the search engines and its users, then it’s not SEO.

SEO is not a shortcut process. Why? It’s because SEO is the process of giving shortcuts to people who are using the search engines. To give shortcuts to others, you need to spend time and efforts looking for those shortcuts. In other words, you sacrifice yourself for the satisfaction of others. Remember that it’s you who will do the optimization, not the people who search, and not the search engine.

Google is perhaps the best search engine in the world. But it’s still having a lot of flaws. There are times that searching Google for the right information becomes a headache because the information you are looking for it’s not there. These flaws are actually opportunities for website owners, publishers and Internet marketers.

When you help a search engine fix its flaws… that becomes search engine optimization. When you help the search engine users find the right information by providing them the quality contents they are looking for, that’s SEO strategy. And when you optimize the design, architecture and popularity of your site that has those quality contents to become visible and rank higher on the search engines, that’s real SEO technique. No excessive usage of the term white hat, no black hat, no grey hat, no nonsense… just common sense.

 

Image by: Danard Vincente on Search Engine Marketing at Flickr