Easy SEO Techniques For Beginning Webmasters

A lot of people ask about black hat SEO as a means toward outsized short-term gains. Many consider black hat to be unethical, but I feel that it is important to understand the inner-workings of websites before we judge.

We need to start with a basic question, what exactly do I mean by black hat SEO? Essentially, this is a phrase that describes using “unfair” techniques to drive results in search engine listings among other things. Most typically, the traffic or artificial clicks that you gain from using black hat methods are extremely temporary… used for short term gains. There is always the risk of being banned from networks like YouTube, Google or StumbleUpon, so caution and patience are always recommended.

There are literally hundreds of variations in black hat techniques, as the phrase is applied to anything in business that appears unfair or shady in nature. I want to have a look at some of the more traditional methods, though I might explore particular methods in-depth in separate articles on theNetFool.com.

Stuffing keywords is a bit like spamming a search engine. To keyword stuff is to take a targeted term phrase, let’s use “make money” as an example, and repeat it excessively throughout your page in an attempt to maximize your search engine ranking positions (SERP). You can have the targeted term reflected in your page, meta tags, alt, titles, links and more. Though it may be considered slightly “old school” as there are many filters nowadays to defeat this practice, it is very possible to achieve a degree of keyword stuffing that won’t get you banned and will help your search engine rankings.

Some webmasters have been able to manufacture so-called “doorway” or “gateway” pages that are little more than invisible pages that are only seen by search engine spiders and are used to increase SEO ranks. By heavily optimizing a website page for a search engine, it is very possible to artificially boost your SERPs while redirecting real visitors safely to your website before they know any better.

Google has been known to support the growth of these artificial gateway pages by redesigning their algorithm to favor overall trust over actual content letting black hat professionals exploit previously established websites for high placements. There are even services like The Content Solution that automatically generate loads of keyword-rich content, supposedly desirable by search engines.

At the end of the day, SEO techniques are just what it is. Some techniques will have long-term gains, while others give you short-term impact. It all comes down to the fundamentals of SEO – rich content, logical navigation, smart keyword research, and legit backlinks. Without these fundamentals, it does not matter what SEO technique you use.