Search engines are an important means to reach your target audience because in today’s online era, people first want to compare your company and its offerings with your competitors before making a purchase decision – all at the click of a mouse! Ensuring a high page ranking on the major search engines is critical for your brand promotion campaigns.
On the other hand search engines need to ensure that they match their visitors’ needs with greater content credibility and more choices than ever, thus for companies to survive and thrive in today’s web centric world need to actively seek higher search engine page rankings. This is achieved by meeting search engine quality parameters which are in turn dependent on the evolving e-visitor search patterns. Search Engine Optimisation (
SEO ) is a set of activities to ensure that a particular web presence is built according to prevailing search engine website popularity ranking norms.
White Hat vs Black Hat Techniques
SEO techniques can take a significant amount of time as web popularity and traffic is not an immediate phenomena. For this reason some companies in their rush to build search engine page rankings faster resort to fake means to ‘fool’ search engine spiders into believing their immense site popularity and their focus on developing ‘perfect web pages’ according to the prevailing search engine criteria of online visitors. This is achieved by making web pages with a significant concentration of popular keywords. Black hat programmers also develop special pages that are visible only to the visiting search engine crawlers (while different pages are visible to online searchers). This is highly risky as search engines are quick to catch these fake sites and promptly ban them (as they undermine search credibility). White Hat techniques on the other hand are using genuine SEO techniques like popular keywords aligned with the accurate value proposition of the offerings, postings at popular directories to boost site links and the correct use of tags (header, title, meta and image) so that the site and its images are easy to locate and faster to download too. These white hat techniques take a considerably longer time to succeed but in the long run are more cost effective.
Cheaters lose heavily
Truth has its own way of winning in almost all spheres of life, including web promotion and SEO. Once a site is banned, you cannot easily get yourself re-registered with the search engines and may have to invest in a new URL and website. One tends to lose much more in the long run that the short term gains. Besides even if you win the SEO stakes, by adopting Black Hat techniques, web savvy visitors are smart enough to reject your shallow content and improper web layouts. Not only do you risk getting banned, but also permanently losing customers. After all, success in business is a marathon and not a 100 metre dash, the same is true in
SEO . It is advisable to go for white hat techniques as they are not only truthful but also ensure that your business retains its adaptive nature to serve online customers better. This makes businesses more agile, search engines more credible and customers more delighted – truly a win-win-win situation!
Reputation always wins
Reputable organisations are serious about every facet of their organisation, including their websites. They are quick in developing new products/service innovations and like to inform their customers. They take care to update web content and like to position themselves at popular e-destinations like blogs and directories thus boosting their link quality and quantity. As serious players they design their websites with customer focused simplicity, mindful of maintaining a search engine friendly format and employing white hat techniques to build the integrity of their brands online.
Contact ROI to see how we can help you with your search engine requirements.
