Intro To SEO 02: Good vs Bad
Like many things in life, there are those who do SEO the good way, and there are those who do SEO the bad way. We’ve talked a little about each before, but now we’ll go a bit in depth.
Let’s start with good SEO, also known as “white hat” SEO. This is Search Engine Optimization that will never be punished because the changes made to a website are performed to benefit the users and not the search engines. That is the heart of legitimate optimization! All the content is elaborate, well-written, well-edited, informative, and helpful.
If you go into to a store to buy a product and ask the clerk for more information about that product, you don’t want to hear a list of useless information. You want immediate answers!
Good SEO benefits the user by providing exactly what they are looking for. Because of this, the user will remain on that website longer, interact with that website more, perhaps even talk about that business on social media to their friends, and Google will take this positive signal into consideration in the search engines. This concept is based on providing a positive user experience. That’s something all of the search engines want to provide. Remember, search engines like Google are service providers as well — their main goal is to serve you pages that would be most likely to benefit you.
Now let’s talk about bad SEO, also called “black hat.” As the name implies, it’s shady. Back in the early-to-late 1990’s it was quite possible (and, unfortunately, very easy) to game the search engines by injecting useless information on a website. This manipulative, deceptive approach would fool the search engine into thinking, “Hey, this site is really good because it has lots of relevant information!” As you can guess, that was not really the case. There were many techniques used in the 90’s that worked very well [temporarily] to get a website at the top of the rankings.
That didn’t last for long.
The search engines got smarter and caught the manipulative websites in the act. Black Hat SEO’s continued in their attempts out-game the search engines by figuring out new techniques could boost their website. And every time this happened, the search engines got smarter even still and penalized those sites.
After reading this, what side do you want to be on? It is a disconcerting fact that there are still many black hat SEO companies out there today providing shady services to their clients. At Social Media Ninjas we effort to provide a very solid user experience for the customers of our clients, and we continue to learn of new methods and applications to help you connect with your clients better!
In the next installment, we’ll go over some simple techniques you can even use right now to help your website and content be discovered by more people.
