houston web designersSEO stands for search engine optimization – a phrase that simply means making a website search-engine friendly. By implementing SEO, your website stands a good chance of getting on the first page of the search engine rankings for the major search engines like Google.

There are plenty of SEO tactics available to make a website search-engine friendly. There are two titles that are frequently heard in this regard and that white hat SEO and black hat SEO.

What is White Hat SEO?

White hat SEO tactics are web optimization strategies that are acceptable to the search engines. This includes getting back links from other websites to increase traffic, adding relevant keywords on articles, etc. The downside however, is that it requires a certain amount of patience and could take some time to work. For this reason, some web designers tend to resort to black hat SEO tactics to gain ranking more rapidly. Houston web designers, you need to ask yourself: is it really worth the risk?

One thing that makes this so difficult is that black hat SEO does work. After all, the SEO principles that are used for both black and white SEO are pretty much the same. It is all about utilizing competitive keywords on the website. The only thing that sets the two apart is how SEO is implemented on the website. The problems with black hat SEO arise when web designers implement SEO techniques that do not comply with the regulations set by the search engines.

What is Black Hat SEO?

To give you an idea why black hat SEO, when detected, is prohibited by search engines, let me show you three of the most common black hat SEO techniques.

Keyword Stuffing:

With regular SEO, it’s a smart move to insert relevant keywords on the body of an article, or include it as the page’s meta-tag so that search engines can index the page according to the page’s relevance. Putting a couple of keyword on a page is just fine, and is an acceptable SEO strategy.

The problem arises when web pages are filled with many keywords that are irrelevant to the page and/or the article just to have many matches for each and every keyword. The downside of stuffing a page with so many keywords is that the page has become incomprehensible to human visitors and search engines don’t like presenting web users with pages that are not relevant to the listed topic and/or keywords.

Using invisible texts:

This black hat SEO technique works by putting a white text against a white background. The text would appear invisible to the human eye; however, search engine crawlers can still see the text and eventually index the page for that keyword. Although it seems like a clever trick, it is against most search engines regulations since it misleads the reader by taking them to a website that did not seek out.

Doorway Page:

Doorway pages are basically fake pages used to trick search engine crawlers to boost a website’s rank. A doorway page is a non-static destination, so there’s no actual page for visitors to read. Doorway pages only lead to poor search engine results which is why the use of it is strictly prohibited by Google.

Is Black Hat Worth the Risk?

Black hat SEO is a fast and effective search engine optimization technique; however, the results are only short lived, and certainly not enough to justify the risk of getting penalized by search engines. My strong recommendation to all Houston web designers is to not touch black hat SEO tactics with a 20-foot pole!

Chris Hunter is an expert Web Designer and Internet Marketer and runs a blog about Internet Marketing techniques. You can also go to his website to learn more about Houston web designers.