Black Hat SEO Tactics

In the UK and the USA in particular, the need for SEO tactics and the employment of a top Social Media Agency has been at the forefront of all business minds for years. We all know the importance of SEO tricks to enhance our web presence. In such an SEO minded, social media-heavy culture like ours, it seems crazy that nowadays a business wouldn’t use Social Media Marketing in their bids to reign supreme. The fight for the top is an increasingly tough one, so it was only a matter of time before little loop-holes were discovered or rules were broken and inevitably a new wave of SEO tactic started to seep onto the net: Black Hat SEO. But what precisely is Black Hat SEO? And what is considered Black-Hat tactic? Most importantly, do they work?

The term "Black Hat SEO" refers to techniques that some businesses and indeed some Social Media Agencies may employ that others see as slightly unethical. This is because they break certain rules of search engines and often compromise on user enjoyment and experience, preferring to present their website content in ways to appeal more to search engine spiders. Three of the most popular Black Hat SEO tactics are:

• Stuffing Keywords: This is considered to be the most unethical SEO tactic as it is the most easily done and therefore employed by a lot of businesses. It involved basically loading a website with keywords or meta tags with obvious repetition with a view to gain maximum ranking. This tactic is now outdated considering the recent changes in the way that search engines rank websites, so this black hat tactic now adds little or no value to the ranking of your site.

• Doorway Pages: This is one of the lesser known black hat techniques involving an invisible page that patrons of your website never actually see because it was created simply to trick the search engine spiders. They contain phrases and keywords purely to appeal to these spiders and once clicked they direct the user to the actual website. This tactic ends up cluttering search engines with completely useless websites, thus making the search engine process far less successful. Also, this form of black hat SEO still takes a lot of time and effort, and this could of course be spent actually employing a reputable Social Media Agency with far more ethical SEO tactics and the experience and knowledge to utilize them successfully.

• Invisible Text: This has to be the most underhand black-hat technique - flat out cheating! This involves hiding lists of keywords and phrases within the text - for example, hiding black text on black backgrounds - again to attract more of those spiders. This too will soon become obsolete thanks to the new search engine requirements.

These are not the only black hat techniques - there are other, far more complicated black hat tactics that could really backfire on your website. There are many help videos available online to help you understand why, view one here. All of this again highlights the importance of utilizing good clean social media marketing! True, these tactics will work to get you ranked on those search engines but this success will be short lived and you could very well find your website banned for utilizing these techniques.

Attribute to: Jag Ture, Cayenne Red: Jag is a member of the PPC advertising agency team at London based Cayenne Red. She has been writing for nearly eight years, specialising in how businesses market themselves online.