In the world of Search Engine Organisation (SEO) there exists an eternal struggle between two forces. Both are as formidable as the other, but with each one having different motives and abilities. They are in constant turmoil with one another affecting many people for better and for worse. The two adversaries are of course White hat techniques and Black hat techniques.

Both have complex strategies in enabling a website to gain places in Search engines results pages (SERP’S). Search engines have strict rules as to how a webpage is ranked, with key factors including; Word repetition, hyper links and content. However Black hat techniques do not comply with these rules as they use a multitude of techniques that are deemed inappropriate by the search engine administrative team.

White hat techniques use much more acceptable ways of SEO; which all adhere to the aforementioned search engine rules. This means search engines will not frown upon any websites that employs white hat SEO techniques. This is why such techniques are much more beneficial to websites rather then using unsecured black hat techniques. At Position Gold we only use the most effective and efficient white hat tactics, to give the best possible attributes to a website.

When dealing with SEO firms it is essential to be able to recognise the cowboys. Companies who use black hat techniques are those who promise implausible results, e.g. top stop on every search engine, within the hour. These companies know that their websites will eventually be found to be practicing illegitimate techniques and will be undoubtedly be temporarily or even permanently banned. So as the old saying goes;

‘If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.’

So choosing the right SEO firm is paramount.

Black hat and White hat tactics are very similar; however the main difference is how excessively they use each aspect of the techniques. Keyword stuffing is used in black hat where as in white hat there are strict controls as to how many times a word can appear on a page, it is shown as a percentage. Cloaking is used in instances where words are hidden, such as being the same colour as the background; this is a black hat technique. Link farms are used to generate incoming links to a website; black hat techniques involve manufacturing such sites with non stop links. White hat however is not involved in such tactics as they only use legitimate links from legitimate sites. Another white hat technique involves creating a lot of creditable content and utilising keywords where possible.