Morgan Marketing Online

When learning how to SEO or search engine optimization its best to learn practical applications that invite web crawlers to think kindly of your site.  The practical techniques are known to Webmasters as white hat SEO and although most webmasters are aware of the darker side known as black hat tactics they are also aware of the repercussions of search engines that don’t look kindly on these activities.  Black hat techniques can leave you in a cold and lonely place on the web.

The implementation of white hat methods are put in place to obtain free traffic to websites especially if you are marketing online selling services or products. There are several methods that you may choose to take advantage of SEO for your site.

The primary reason to use SEO is of course to achieve a high rank within the search engines and by following the rules of legitimate practices you will be looked upon kindly by the search engines gods themselves.

First of all there are two categories that concern SEO techniques and are widely known as white hat or black hat.  The good guys follow white hat practices and are used by legitimate SEO services.

There are companies that use black hat SEO methods usually for quick results and should be highly scrutinized by online business owners that want to avoid a future problem with search engines and may end in being banned completely from the internet itself.

On a personal note I was approached early in 2009 by a company that promised me first page rankings and guaranteed my site success for a small fee of a $1,000!  For giggles and grins I hung in for the entire phone presentation to be able to inform other webmasters fair warning about this particular company.

During the initial presentation the poor telemarketer did a really natural and good delivery on the script, but you could hear the boiler room atmosphere in the background.  Then the “closer” got on the line and that’s when things got really heated.

I must say this salesman was extremely good, handling objections with such ease and grace I envisioned naïve webmasters handing over their credit card numbers mesmerized by his trickery.  When he finally realized I wasn’t biting his final attempt was to scream at me “DON’T DO THIS TO YOUR FAMILY!”  After maintaining my solid stance with no intension of handing over my credit card a pregnant pause ensued followed by a very earsplitting click and a dial tone.

To this day his catchy phrase “Don’t do this to your family” has been widely adopted in the office as a joke and never goes without an uproar of laughter.

My point is not all black hat SEO companies are as obvious as my example but in retrospect the company would have charged my company 1K and then I would have enjoyed first page rankings for a couple weeks until my company was banned from Google.

By having a clear understanding of black hat SEO you’ll avoid going to the dark side and the time consuming repercussions.   Cloaking and spamdexing are used to mislead visitors and search engine spiders.  Search engines are highly sophisticated these days and will penalize your website.

White hat techniques are best practices and should be followed.  It is very important first and foremost that you have a clear understanding of keyword research.  Web pages that are optimized for your keywords that you are trying to rank for will show up in search engine results for your products or services if done correctly.

Optimizing SEO is the best tactic for ranking in organic search; it’s free and is understood by webmasters as an inexpensive means of marketing online. Unlike other marketing media there is no huge investment to set up the infrastructure, mobilizing your resources and tracking progress.

Inbound links also play a very important part of SEO.   These links form the basis for search engines to rank, through a sort of balloting system, websites .  An inward or inbound link from a quality website to your site speaks highly of your site in the algorithmic mind of search engine spiders.  The better related the more powerful especially from authority sites. If your thinking of signing up for a service to create backlinks it’s best that you don’t go from 0 to 500 overnight.

Submit your website to as many directories as possible. The two heavy hitters are The Open Directory Project (ODP), more formally known as DMOZ, and Yahoo!

Finally SEO technique of content optimization is probably the most important of all for search engine optimization.  The process simply means that while you are utilizing your key word or words in the correct density within your content you must make sure the reading experience is user friendly. Optimize each page of your site and remember to use internal linking.

White hat SEO tactics will always win in the race for best practices over questionable black hat tactics to appease the search engine gods.  So choose your hats wisely when optimizing your site for organic results if you decide to saddle up and wear a white hat you’ll be saddling up with a good group for the long tail opps I mean trail ahead!