Good SEO v. Bad SEO? Is There a Difference?

I can’t help thinking of Spy vs Spy. Only in the world of online marketing, we have White Hat SEO vs Black Hat SEO.

Black hat SEO … is using tactics for search engine optimization that are generally regarded as spammy, dishonest, or otherwise “bad.”

White hat SEO … is the “correct” way of optimizing your website so it shows up in search.

But is there really good and evil in SEO?

What’s wrong with Black Hat SEO?

The problem with black hat SEO is that in trying to get cheap, quick results from the search engines, webmasters resort to using spam and trickery. For example, they might write a bunch of lame articles stuffed with keywords instead of investing in useful, informative content their readers will actually enjoy. Or worse, they’ll steal your content and claim it as their own.

In addition to such spammy and annoying black hat SEO tactics, there are some tricks (which I am not going to outline here) that are more insidious. Get caught engaging in any of these and you risk getting your website booted out of the search rankings altogether.

That’s not to say black hat SEO never works. Like in the Spy vs Spy comic, it’s sometimes hard to tell who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in SEO.

What’s wrong with white hat SEO

White hat SEO is a long, tedious process. It involves keyword research and using those keywords responsibly on your website. It means putting in the time and effort to earn incoming links from other sites. And it requires that you keep your website updated with fresh information.

The problem with white hat SEO is that it doesn’t always work the way you’d hoped. It’s time and money intensive to do on a large scale, and it’s a difficult game for little guys and newcomers to break into. Furthermore, with a proliferation of SEO “gurus,” it’s hard to know who you can trust.

So how do you get SEO results?

I suggest making SEO just one part of a larger Internet marketing strategy. Start by building a website that has attractive design and engaging content. Make sure that site uses SEO keywords throughout. Then, promote the dickens out of your website using social media, email, guest blog posts, directories, webinars, customer reviews, youtube videos, and whatever else you can think of. The attention you earn by promoting your website will help boost your SEO rankings.

Keep in mind these SEO tips:

• No SEO company can guarantee first page rankings in Google; especially for highly competitive keywords.
• Buying links is considered black hat SEO and can get you into trouble.
• Search engines are constantly evolving to recognize quality, so providing real answers to consumers questions is one of the best ways to get yourself ranked.

My company, The Website Wordsmith, can provide you with all of your Internet marketing needs. In addition to the best SEO copywriting on the Internet (she said humbly), my network of providers can supply you with expert web design and development, link building, social media management, email marketing, and much more. Click here to get in touch today.