Proper SEO and "Black Hat" SEO
Ever since the early 2000’s, the early days of search engines, Google (among others) gave pagerank to a website based on the amount of links from other sites that were linking to it. This simple premise led to companies paying groups of people to create links, called “linkbuilders”, on other sites such as forums. This is one of the most well-known “black hat” SEO techniques that has been used by many businesses even to this day.
Fast forward a few years to 2011 when Google made one of the first major changes to it’s algorithm (the brain that decides what ranking to give websites) and rolled out what they call the “Panda” update. This update was the first step in bringing down the “black hat” SEO techniques that started becoming all too common among internet companies. In 2012 Google rolled out their biggest change yet called “Penguin” which down ranks any website that is participating in link building, keyword stuffing, duplicate content, and any other nefarious SEO technique.
Matt Cutts once said, “The best SEO is no SEO.” If you ever get calls or emails from marketing firms that say they have a “special relationship” with Google and will put you at the top of search results for a low price, they are most likely the “black hat” SEO companies trying to find work. DO NOT pay them to do SEO because your domain will be marked as spam and will be completely REMOVED from search results all-together.
The proper way to do SEO can be summed up with this statement: create a great website with great design, great content, and a great user experience. The better the experience, the more people will want to share the site on social networks and come back. I only create websites with the best SEO practices in mind. I use Google’s Webmaster Tools to fine tune and make sure the website is performing it’s best and make sure each page has unique meta descriptions, page title’s, proper use of meta keywords, and I even check page load times.
Not sure what this post is about? Still wondering what SEO stands for? Check out my previous post and get educated!