The Good Side And Bad Side Of SEO

In every internet marketing methods used by webmasters to promote their website and their services, there is always a good side and bad side. One example is with online advertisement. Online advertisements are used to promote one's services online, however, there is also class of advertising methods which are considered unethical and may even be illegal. These include external applications which alter system settings, spawn pop-ups, and insert advertisements into non-affiliated webpages. Such applications are usually labelled as spyware or adware.

The dark side (or illegal techniques) of internet marketing is usually an abuse of techniques used in the light side (or legal techniques) of internet marketing. Popular examples for this is with those found in SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Currently, according to SEO Philippines consultants, there are several techniques that falls under two classifications, the White Hat SEO and the Black Hat SEO. These are terms were inspired by movies in the pasts in which good guys would wear white hats while the bad guys would wear black hats.

An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception while Black Hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. Techniques used in Black Hat SEO are usually an abuse of the techniques used in White Hat SEO, such as with the content of the webpage.

In White Hat SEO, keywords are usually used and placed in key locations of the whole website, particularly in the main or home page. Keywords are embedded while maintaining its readability for human visitors. This technique, however, is abused in Black Hat SEO by over stuffing their web pages with these keywords. This technique is known as keyword stuffing in which involves the calculated placement of keywords within a page to raise the keyword count, variety, and density of the page. However, according to SEO Philippines consultants, modern search engines have the ability to analyze a page for keyword stuffing and determine whether the frequency is consistent with other sites created specifically to attract search engine traffic.

Another abuse of one White Hat SEO is with the use of Meta Tags, which is called Meta Tag stuffing in Black Hat SEO. This usually involves repeating keywords in the Meta tags, and using meta keywords that are unrelated to the site's content. However, according to SEO Philippines consultants, this tactic has been ineffective since 2005.

One recent abuse of a White Hat SEO technique is with blog commenting to acquire one-way links. In Black Hat SEO, this technique as abused by spamming unrelated comments to blogs and other websites. This technique is known as blog spamming or spam in blog. This technique involves placing or solicitation of links randomly on other sites, placing a desired keyword into the hyperlinked text of the inbound link. Comment spam is a form of link spam that has arisen in web pages that allow dynamic user editing such as wikis, blogs, and guestbooks.

There are many other techniques used in White Hat SEO which was widely abused by webmasters to result in being considered as a Black Hat SEO. However, there are also techniques that use Black Hat SEO which are considered to be good as well. These techniques are called Grey Hats. Visit http://www.myoptimind.com for more info.