The colors of SEO Hat

Arun Venkit February 10, 2009 6 comments

SEO is one of the marketing strategies used for increasing site visibility in search engines. Different people follow different SEO techniques for organic promotion in search engines; some may be ethical, some non-ethical and others intermediate. These practices are colored according to techniques used, compared with the search engines recommendations and guidelines.

White hat SEO … Called as ethical SEO, it follows search engines’ guidelines. In this a content page that the search engine indexes and subsequently ranks would contain the same content that a visitor would see. White hat advice is explained as a procedure of creating content for users, not for search engines, thereby making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than finding out a method to trick the algorithm from its designated intention.

Black hat SEO – known as Unethical SEO, is a procedure that tries to achieve high rankings in a short time by using various SEO techniques that don’t follow search engine guidelines, or treated as means of deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another black hat method is creating different pages for the search engines and the users, depending on who is accessing the website. This method is referred to as cloaking.

Gray Hat SEO – These are SEO tactics that cannot be termed either as ethical or unethical, but can be termed as something in between the two. It is unlikely that a site gets banned or can have negative effects on it, due to following Gray Hat SEO tactics.

Green Hat SEO – It is just a matter of putting all unnecessary procedures and SEO actions to an end and focusing on what all is essential to get in website visitors. When the focus is given more on the importance and prominence to the people who visit your website, your site will create more brand awareness, thereby becoming more trustworthy, rather than targeting keywords that provide more traffic, even though it means that you do not have any relevant pages suitable for them. It is to be understood that a happy customer is someone who is more important to your business to get more profit to you, rather than getting more of inward links.

Blue Hat SEO – Some say it’s related to advanced SEO techniques used for web promotion but the same has not yet been declared by any top SEO communities or SEO groups. Originally Blue Hat SEO is a name of a weblog so many misunderstand 🙂

And please do note that these SEO colors are not standard ones, they are marketing types distinguished between SEOs who adopt their SEO techniques from ethical to unethical or a mix of both. Probably in the near future, we might even come up with more colors of SEO as seen in rainbow!!! 😉