The SEO techniques are classified into two broad categories:
- White Hat SEO
- Black Hat SEO
White Hat SEO:
The white hat SEO techniques refer to the SEO techniques which are in accordance with the SEO guidelines set by the search engines which means it uses approved search engine optimization techniques to increase the ranking of a site on search engine results pages (SERP).
It mainly focuses on the human audience as opposed to a search engine, unlike Black Hat SEO. People who are looking for long-term investment on their websites rely on white hat SEO techniques.
SEO tactic is considered as White Hat only if it has the following features:
- It follows the search engine’s guidelines and not using any deception.
- It allows the user to see the same content that search engine indexes and ranks meaning that there is no deception.
- It confirms that a web page content should have been created for the users and not just for the search engines.
- It confirms that the quality of the web pages is good and useful under the White Hat SEO practice.
- It confirms the availability of useful content on the web pages.
It is a must to follow white hat SEO tactics and you should never try to fool your visitors.
Black Hat SEO:
The Black Hat SEO refers to the SEO techniques which are not in accordance with the SEO guidelines set by the search engines. These techniques exploit the weaknesses in search engines to get higher rankings for websites on the search engine results pages (SERP).
The black hat SEO mainly focuses on search engines and not on the human audience. The users who are looking for a quick financial return on their website rather than a long term investment use black hat SEO techniques.
SEO tactic is considered as Black Hat or Spamdexing only if it has the following features:
- Redirecting users to human-friendly pages from search engine friendly pages or redirecting users to any page which is different from the page which was earlier ranked by the search engine.
- Using cloaking SEO in which one version of the page is served to search engine spiders/bots and another version is served to human visitors.
- Employing meta tag stuffing in which keywords are repeated in meta tags but the content is not related to those keywords.
- Employing keyword stuffing in which keywords are placed in a calculated manner in a content.
- Using Doorway or Gateway pages in which low-quality web pages contain very little content which is stuffed with the same kinds of keywords and phrases.
- Using mirror websites in which multiple websites or different URLs use conceptually similar content.
- Incorporating Page Hijacking practices.