As you discover the vast world of search engine optimization techniques, you will find that there are methods that Google (and other search engines) favors, and there are methods that Google frowns upon. White hat techniques are considered processes and techniques that Google thinks are fair and valid for establishing creditability for a web site, while black hat techniques are quite the opposite.
White Hat Techniques
It is important to know that long-term results will only be found through white hat techniques. When Google believes a site is trying to “game” the system, it will quit sending traffic to that site. An internet marketing plan should only include those which Google and the other search engines will favor, otherwise your work could end up being fruitless.
A typical example of a white hat technique is creating an article (or page) on your site that is optimized for one or two long-tale search strings. By way of example, my real estate web site has thousands of pages, and many of these have been optimized for specific queries that my customers will use. You can imagine that “buy a house” might be a highly trafficked and highly competitive search string, but what about “lease purchase agreement Tallahassee?” I have optimized several pages on my site for people looking for more information on lease purchase agreements in Tallahassee, Florida. The amount of traffic from this one string is not enormous, but it is sufficient to warrant the work it took to produce the pages. Can you guess which web site has the #1 search result in Google for lease purchase agreements in Tallahassee?
Now expand upon this concept even further (and then you’ll understand why I have thousands of pages). How many niche, long tale search strings deliver the kind of traffic that your company, product, or service would like to receive? Most web sites contain little optimization for search strings, yet these very sites pay enormous amounts of money to advertise to drive traffic to their sites. Imagine receiving scores of unpaid visitors who have found your website because you “own” the best articles on nearly every conceivable search string your customers will ever use when searching at a search engine.
White hat techniques bring people with “questions” to your company website because you have already written the “answers.” There are many more white hat techniques that the Internet Squeeze will cover in later posts. The message today is that internet marketing professionals should be students of search engine optimization and know what is considered fair, and what will be considered “gaming the system” and most likely result in negative consequences for the company website.
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