I am not going to lie to you. White Hat SEO is harder than Black Hat SEO. Period. But while a black hat technique might get you ranked really quickly for a popular keyword, it can just as easily get your site banned by Google.

Maybe not today. Maybe not this year. But it will happen.

And if you are depending on those organic visitors to bring in your revenue, what happens to you if those visitors disappear overnight? It happened to one site run by Brad Fallon. No, his site wasn’t into black hat techniques, but a change at Google on the search methods caused his site to fall off the organic listings overnight. Although Google brought his sites back after a while, the lesson Brad learned that dreadful day have stayed with him, as you can imagine.

Build solid. Build consistently. Build right.

Don’t be tempted into the black hat camp for quick returns when you have no idea what the costs associated are. For example, don’t be tempted to stuff keywords in a font color that matches your background so visitors don’t see it by the search engine spiders do. That’s black hat.

Black Hat search engine optimization is customarily defined as techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner. These black hat SEO techniques usually include one or more of the following characteristics:

• Breaks search engine rules and regulations
• Creates a poor user experience directly because of the black hat SEO techniques utilized on the Web site
• Unethically presents content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.

You achieve SEO rankings and organic traffic because you put in the work to analyze the competitive landscape, do thorough keyword research, write effective, usable, SEO friendly web copy. You get good results when you have the correct structure to your small business blog, with proper internal linking and categorization of content. Natural listings happen with you find the right sites to get backlinks from. These are the powerful steps necessary to achieve authority with the search engines.

Black Hat SEO Techniques To Avoid

I list these techniques not to teach you black hat SEO, but to show you what to avoid at all costs.

• Keyword stuffing: Packing long lists of keywords and nothing else onto your site will get you penalized eventually by search engines.
• Invisible text: This is putting lists of keywords in white text on a white background in hopes of attracting more search engine spiders. Again, not a good way to attract searchers or search engine crawlers.
• Doorway Pages: A doorway page is basically a “fake” page that the user will never see. It is purely for search engine spiders, and attempts to trick them into indexing the site higher.

Black Hat SEO can be tempting. After all, these tricks actually do work, temporarily. They do end up getting sites higher search rankings, that is, until these same sites get banned for using unethical practices.

It’s just not worth the risk. Use efficient search engine optimization techniques to get your site ranked higher, and stay away from anything that even looks like Black Hat SEO.

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