Grey-Hat SEO Tactics

The SEO tactics that fall in the grey area between legitimate tactics and search engine spam are considered to be “grey-hat” SEO Tactics. They include tactics such as cloaking, paid links, duplicate content and a number of others. Unless you are on the correct side of this equation these tactics are not recommended.

Grey-Hat SEO Tactics:

• Cloaking
  White Side – There are times when cloaking is considered a legitimate tactic by users and search engines alike. Basically, if there is a logical reason why you should be allowed to present different information to the search engines than the visitor (if you have content behind a “members only” area for example) you are relatively safe. Another example of a site legitimately using cloaking, is when the site is mainly image-based such as an art site. In this event, provided that the text used to represent the page accurately defines the page and image(s) on it, this could be considered a legitimate use of cloaking.

  Black Side – This tactic is considered to be very risky and it is recommended that you contact each search engine, present your reasoning, and allow them the opportunity to approve it’s use.

• Duplicate Content
  Black Side – Duplicate content on the web has increasingly became a significant problem for both search engines as well as search engine users alike with the same or similar sitesdominating the top positions in the search engine results pages.

  To address this problem many search engines have added filters that seek out pages with the same or very similar content and eliminate the duplicate. Even at times when the duplicate content is not detected by the search engines it is often reported by competitors and the site’s rankings penalized.

  White Side – There are times when duplicate content is considered legitimate by both search engines and visitors and that is on resource sites. A site that consists primarily as an index of articles on a specific subject-matter will not be penalized by posting articles that occur elsewhere on the net, though the weight it may be given as additional content will likely not be as high as a page of unique content.

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Any SEO tactic that maintains the integrity of your website and the SERPs (search engine results pages) is considered a “white-hat” search engine optimization tactic. These are the only tactics that we will use whenever applicable and which enhance rather than detract from your website and from the rankings.

White-Hat SEO Tactics:

• Internal Linking
  By far one of the easiest ways to stop your website from ranking well on the search engines is to make it difficult for search engines to find their way through it. Many sites use some form of script to enable fancy drop-down navigation, etc. Many of these scripts cannot be crawled by the search engines resulting in unindexed pages.

  While many of these effects add visual appeal to a website, if you are using scripts or some other form of navigation that will hinder the spidering of your website it is important to add text links to the bottom of at least your homepage linking to all you main internal pages including a sitemap to your internal pages.

• Reciprocal Linking
  Exchanging links with other webmasters is a good way (not the best, but good) of attaining additional incoming links to your site. While the value of reciprocal links has declined a bit over the past year they certainly still do have their place.

  A VERY important note is that if you do plan on building reciprocal links it is important to make sure that you do so intelligently. Random reciprocal link building in which you exchange links with any and virtually all sites that you can will not help you over the long run. Link only to sites that are related to yours and who’s content your visitors will be interested in and preferably which contain the keywords that you want to target. Building relevancy through association is never a bad thing unless you’re linking to bad neighborhoods (penalized industries and/or websites).

  If you are planning or currently do undertake reciprocal link building you know how time consuming this process can be. An useful tool that can speed up the process is PRProwler. Essentially this tool allows you to find related sites with high PageRank, weeding out many of the sites that would simply be a waste of time to even visit. You can read more about PRProwler on our search engine positioning tools page.

• Content Creation
  Don’t confuse “content creation” with doorway pages and the such. When we recommend content creation we are discussing creating quality, unique content that will be of interest to your visitors and which will add value to your site.

  The more content-rich your site is the more valuable it will appear to the search engines, your human visitors, and to other webmasters who will be far more likely to link to your website if they find you to be a solid resource on their subject.

  Creating good content can be very time-consuming, however it will be well worth the effort in the long run. As an additional bonus, these new pages can be used to target additional keywords related to the topic of the page.

• Writing For Others
  You know more about your business that those around you so why not let everyone know? Whether it be in the form of articles, forum posts, or a spotlight piece on someone else’s website, creating content that other people will want to read and post on their sites is one of the best ways to build links to your website that don’t require a reciprocal link back.
• Site Optimization
  The manipulation of your content, wording, and site structure for the purpose of attaining high search engine positioning is the backbone of SEO and the search engine positioning industry. Everything from creating solid title and meta tags to tweaking the content to maximize it’s search engine effectiveness is key to any successful optimization effort.

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