Being white hat pays off in the long run!

Marni Weinberg - May 16, 2008

I must sound like a broken record when I suggest (much too weak a word) that my clients follow all of the above, specifically with respect to the big players in the industry: Google, Yahoo and MSN. Search Engines are smart; real smart. You might be able to pull the wool over their eyes in the short term, but eventually you will get caught if you try to utilize Black Hat techniques to gain better traction within the organic (free) results. Everyone wants to be #1 in Google for their core keywords, however, there is no way to get there (and remain there) other than by making your website as search engine friendly as possible. What does that really mean? In the simplest of terms, there has to be a high degree of correlation between the keywords you want to show up under and the actual content on your website. The more targeted and relevant the content, the better chance you have of achieving natural positions for the keywords that are mission critical to your business.

All of that being said, one of the most frustrating things for marketers is when they optimize their site for natural search, while strictly following the rules and guidelines set forth by the engines and employ White Hat techniques yet they (A) do not see significant progress being made and/or (B) see their competition showing up under their core keywords. Even worse, the competition is not following a Best Practices approach. In other words they are doing things that are heavily frowned upon by the engines, such as: keyword stuffing, duplicate content, redirects, etc. A couple of important things to consider: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) must be viewed as an ongoing process and it can take several months to reap the rewards of optimizing your site. The search engines are always changing their algorithms and therefore, it is crucial to view SEO as a long term commitment. Your competition might not follow a Best Practices approach and utilize Black Hat methods to “get ahead”. Just because they are not being penalized at present, does not mean that they will not get caught eventually. I recently had a client who saw their competition using Black Hat techniques and achieving great organic results. They decided to utilize the same techniques and were banned from Google as a result. The moral of the story is that the best things come to those who wait. If you optimize your site and “make nice” to the search engines, you will maintain a long term presence in the engines.

Title: Being White Hat Pays Off in the Long Run!
Description: Discussed the importance of following a best practices approach
Keywords: White Hat, Black Hat, Best Practices, Search Engines, Marketers, keyword stuffing, duplicate content, redirects, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Google, Yahoo, MSN.