Search Engine Marketing, Westerns And What Has It All Got To Do With Getting Your Company On The Internet.

There have been a lot of news stories of late about private wheel clamping businesses. One in particular mentioned a young man who had his vehicle clamped outside his own residence. He had a parking permit but regrettably it had fallen down from the windscreen so was not visible to the clampers, and even though he was able to display this to them he still was required to pay three hundred pounds to get the clamp removed. The statement was made that the conduct of the clamping business were legal but were they ethical. This real life situation really helps depict the different methods used to promote websites online by a Search Engine Optimization Company. They are called correspondingly Black Hat and White Hat optimisation.

The 2 names come from a reference to old American westerns, where the bad guy always wore a black hat and the good guy wore a white one. Consequently Black Hat optimisation is the bad guy, it’s not necessarily illegal but it is unethical. Some examples of Black Hat Online Marketing are keyword stuffing, cloaking and doorway pages, all of these procedures are used by Online Marketing businesses to get a quick financial return from the website and the fact that the site will commonly end up being banned is of little consequence. Keyword Stuffing involves placing repeating sequences of keywords in both the meta tags or actual content of the website. Cloaking is a procedure that is commonly run by server side scripting and it presents a different version of a page to a search engine spider than the one that is displayed in the internet browser. This hidden page will contain repetitions of keywords. Doorway pages work in a comparable way, but since nearly all search engines now discover and remove from their listings any doorway pages they find, most doorway pages tend to just try and trick the searcher into clicking a link for redirection. As already mentioned all these methods will result in better Search Engine Placement in the short term, but will certainly ruin a good internet reputation in the process.

The good guy is White Hat Online Marketing; this is the ethical way of publicising your internet site and whilst Black Hat Online Marketing is routinely aimed at the search engines, White Hat Online Marketing considers the human audience. It is a long term procedure that follows very closely the search engines rules and policies. Some examples of White Hat Online Marketing are keyword analysis, back linking, link building and writing content for human readers. All of these are more intensive and time consuming than their Black Hat equivalents. Keyword analysis involves interacting with a client to find out as much as possible about their business to put together a keyword list, then using the different search engine analytical tools picking the best to use for their site. Both back linking and link building build page ranking in a comparable way by linking a site to others offering comparable products or services. The procedure of writing content for human audiences it the most time consuming of all the White Hat processes and is definitely not used by the unethical Black Hat fraternity.