Ethical Online Marketing - Black Hats Vs the White Hats

Ever received a piece of spam promising you submission to thousands of search engines? Well the truth is there are not that many. In fact if you have an Australian target market there is less than five you need to worry about and only one you really should concentrate on.

There are a number of ways to get your site up the top of Google results page. Some are good and some are not so good. The unethical or black hat ways may work for a short term gain but you should stay away from them if you are trying to build a business for the longer term.
One of the main black hat techniques is to use an automated process to build hundreds of websites that all have links that point back to your site. All those links theoretically, make your site more popular to the search engines. However the search engine bots are getting better and better and picking up these sorts of ploys. The end result will be that your site will be banned or 'sandboxed' in SEO jargon.

Another technique that is very popular with the black hats, is to build one page for a human to look at and another for the search engines to see. This is known as cloaking and in the end can also get your site in the bad books with the search engines.

An older technique that used to be popular was having the same colour text on the same colour background. This would mean it would be invisible to a human but the search engines would pick it up. The text would be just lots of keywords and phrases.

The search engines are trying to produce the most relevant results for the searchers. Any attempt to mislead them will usually see your site penalised. So what is search engine optimisation then I hear you ask? Basically what we do is make sure your site and your messages are tailored in such a way that they don't get lost in the digital storm.

Whilst we make sure your keywords and phrases are targeted throughout the a site it is important to make sure that that all copy is written for humans to read and not search engine bots.