White Hats, Black Hats and Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft

SEO is not magic. It can be complicated but it not magical. SEOs have tried to split themselves into two distinct camps: White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO. White Hats SEOs act in ways that are within the terms and conditions of thesearch engines and Black Hat SEOs act outwith these. Unfotunately for you as a website owner these ‘terms and conditions’ are vague – leaving no hard and fast rules as to what is ethical and what is unethical.

What is Ethical Search Engine Optimisation?

Ethical SEO can best be thought of as giving search eninges the information they need to rank your site effectively in the way that they want it. Search Engines want you to have content from which they can understand what you sell. They want other web pages to reinforce this through links. So if you talk about a product/service/subject on your website and other web pages reinforce this with links you’ll rank better.

Unethical SEO will ‘game’ search engines and use this to drive traffic to your site. If you’re caught you could get kicked out of the major search engines. Don’t believe me? You know BMW, that huge company, they got kicked out so dont think Google or Yahoo! won’t when they find you’ve been up to things that are dodgy.

Protect Yourself against Unethical SEO

The first thing to do when you decide to get an SEO company working for you, or you start doing it yourself, is get a grip on SEO. Go to Google and do a search for “search engine optimisation tutorial”, “SEO forum” or other related things. You see the parts where every site you read agrees – it’s probably safe to do these things. If you see something that looks too good to be true such as 1,000′s of links for a couple of pounds it probably is and stay well away.