This was a contributed post. The author’s views below are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of CLOUDROCK.
Editor’s Note: The term ‘SEO Hat’ refers to the various approaches to SEO that is adopted by different practitioners to increase their visibility in the search engines.
SEO techniques plays a vital role in making your website more prominent over the Internet. Different SEO techniques are used by various practitioners to rank their websites in the SERPs. There are various SEO Hats available to the budding practitioner.
First, there is White Hat SEO, which is completely in line with Google’s guidelines. Next is Grey Hat SEO and then there is Black Hat, which involves activities that the Big G is out to punish. While these three are the most well-known, various other SEO Hats such as Green and Blue hat techniques have emerged. In this article, we will take a quick look at all the various techniques.
Types of SEO Hats
We discuss the various approaches to SEO here to help you decide which might be most suitable for your specific situation.
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White Hat SEO (or Good One)
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Grey Hat SEO (Think Before Doing)
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Black Hat SEO (You will Get Caught One Day)
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Blue Hat SEO (See In The Future)
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Green Hat SEO (Get The Authority)
This type of SEO is common, but has restricted tools and strategies that can be used to optimize your website. The most common White Hat SEO techniques include the creation of quality content, extensive keyword research, email marketing and guest blogging. White Hat SEO is genuine (follows Google’s Webmaster Guidelines) and your website would (or should) not be affected or penalized whenever there is a Google update (even if it’s a Panda or Penguin update).
Grey hat SEO techniques lie in between White Hat and Black Hat techniques in terms of adherence to Google’s guidelines.
Proponents of this technique sometimes use article spinning and keyword stuffing to optimize their pages for various search engines. This means that there is still a chance that you might get penalized during one of Google’s many algorithm updates, affecting your online reputation. Article spinning occurs when text is rewritten or is spun (using a software called an article spinner) to make it seem unique. The problem is that most of the time, there is an overuse of keywords and depending on how well the spinning is done, your text may not even be human readable.
This form of SEO is usually deemed ‘unethical’ because it goes directly against what Google wants (as stated in its webmaster guidelines and quality quide).
The Black Hat SEO uses spammy techniques such as keyword stuffing, link framing, cloaking and poorer quality content to optimize your websites. These techniques promise to rank your quickly on the first page of a search engine, but they also have greater chances of caught and blacklisted. In severe cases, your website might even be removed from the search engine’s index.
This type of SEO includes advanced SEO techniques and the latest Internet marketing strategies. It comprises a mix of both advanced White and Black hat strategies. Blue Hat was the name of a popular SEO blog evolved into a type of approach to SEO.
This technique is more focused on ranking by getting links from authoritative websites. Most discussions on Green Hat SEO revolve around how to get links from authoritative websites and how webmasters can best use these links to maximize the link juice on their own websites.
All these types of SEO techniques have been used for years and people are following these to rank pages. But over time, Google has been imposing stricter rules and launching new updates to filter out the spammier sites. Which SEO Hat are you going to wear? Consider carefully before you start.
Written By:
Rafiq Elmansy is in charge of reputation management for his firm. In past he was working as social media manager in his firm. But due to his expertise and talent in handling reputation management tasks, he was hired as reputation management manager. Rafiq Elmansy also enjoys doing his tasks with care and patience without creating any mess or business loss.