SEO TIPS: Avoiding Black Hat SEOs

Not all SEO is good, some can actually get you penalized. Black Hat SEO tactics that are banned can take your site right down with them if you get caught – and sooner or later everyone gets caught. It’s best just to avoid anything that could be construed as shades of gray, and stick with proven white hat tactics to get your site moving up the SERPs. Gaming the system may work temporarily, but eventually it always winds up being a bigger problem than doing it right.

Regardless of whether you are doing your own SEO, listening to the advice of various ‘gurus’ or outsourcing, you need to watch your back and not get drawn into black hat SEO just to see fast results. In the long run, you will only hurt your site, and could end up penalized severely for trying to game the search engines. You could even get banned.

You don’t want to pay for any links, spam search engines, blogs or forums, dishonest reviews or link to disreputable mass linking schemes. The best route to success is to not use white on white text, keyword stuffing or other activities that are patently wrong. It’s just not worth it.

The better approach is to concentrate your efforts on the well established business of organic linking, article marketing and judicious social book-marking. This is a route that Google does favor and will reward. If you produce plenty of relevant, informational content and carve out a niche for yourself of which you are the leading expert, you can do wonders with getting your search results up fairly quickly.

Use articles, press releases, web content, blogging, Squidoo lenses, videos, graphics and any  content that can be optimized with a common goal which is marketing you as the most relevant result in your field. You will need to research – choose a niche, find long tail keywords, run an  ad campaign and optimize content for any affiliates you might want to partner with.

It‘s not easy to do – you have to follow through. Even if you are using a company to handle a lot of it for you, you have to always be in the loop and making sure that you are getting what you paid for. You want to be sure that they are not using any uncertified methods to game the system that will only result in you getting sandboxed or banned when caught.

Once you have your head straight about white and black hat SEO is, you can ask yourself every time you get ready to do something new, “Is this relevant? Is it helpful? Anything that helps the USER is usually a good thing. If you play by the rules and watch your step, you can build a solid foundation for your site. Anything else is bound to crumble away. White hat SEO is the way to go – anything else is asking for trouble!