Why Ethical SEO Techniques Should Be Used And Black hat Tactics Avoided

Now that an increasing number of brands and businesses are starting to recognise how important strong on and off-page SEO is if you want your sites to rank well in search engines, one could argue that the need for staff members who are aware of SEO techniques and how they can help or hinder your business has never been so important. The faster that SEO gets results the better some say, so it is almost understandable that some companies are occasionally tempted to use techniques that get brilliant results in no time at all, but are in breach of the 'Terms of Service' that search engines like Google and Bing live by. These methods (that respectable SEO agencies avoid at all costs) are known as unethical or 'black hat'. 'Black hat' SEO tactics essentially trick search algorithms into thinking particular sites are full of high quality content, and pushes them up the search rankings for particular key terms. A once popular method of doing this used to be the addition of hidden text and links to sites. This is where text is included on a page but then the colour is changed to match the background so site visitors cannot see the text, but search engines can. This particular tactic is now easy for search engines to detect so is relatively uncommon. Many unethical SEO firms also use duplicate content. If search engines penalised every site that posts duplicate content, there would be no such thing as press releases and press release sites. However, the search algorithms used appear to be complex enough to recognise when a piece of writing is being used to manipulate rankings (Google and Bing do not release details of their search algorithms but a good SEO operative will be able to spot when changes are made and can easily identify pieces that would be considered spam by a search engine). By using black hat tactics, you potentially run the risk of having your site penalised and dropped down the rankings or in extreme circumstances, completely removed from searches. This can be devastating to an online business. An SEO company worth its salt will never resort to using techniques of this kind so if domain buying, comment spamming or anything suspicious sounding is mentioned during meetings, consider these alarm bells and get out while you still can! Ethical SEO takes a considerable amount of planning and can cost you more money, but the results are clearly worth it. Not only will you get strong content that links to you site, you will have access to the web knowledge your SEO holds in their head and advice should any aspect of the discipline confuse you. A content farm in India or some other far flung location cannot compete with that.