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When it Comes to SEO, the Color of your Hat Matters

SEO White Hat

In movies set in the wild west, the good guys always wore white and the bad guys donned black. The same is true in the world of search engine optimization (SEO).

“Black hat SEO” is a term referring to unethical techniques employed to “trick” the search engines to rank a web page in a top spot of its organic search, despite its true relevance – or lack thereof. Examples of black hat techniques include:

doorway pages — website entry pages filled with keywords that are crawled by the search engine bots, but visitors are immediately redirected to the “real” entry page.
keyword stuffing — placing a lot of keywords on a web page rather than quality content.
invisible text — placing keywords on a page in the same color as the background so that the human visitor doesn’t see them, but the search engine bots do.

Although black hat SEO techniques may deliver top rankings in the short run, sites employing these run the risk of being penalized — or even banned — from the search engines.

“White hat SEO” refers to techniques used to aid search engines in understanding and ranking content based on adhering to SEO best practices. There are numerous things a website owner may do to improve a site’s SEO, but it all amounts to one thing: build a site that is very rich with quality content and people and the search engines will find the site. Google provides a lot of information about SEO best practices. Give it a read for an even better understanding of white hat SEO and you’ll be sure to have happy trails.

Happy Trails for the White Hat SEO

November Search Volume by Search Engine

comScore (website) tracks the volume of searches in the United States each month. Following are their findings for November 2008, compared to October 2008.

November 2008 U.S. Core Search Rankings

Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in November with 63.5 percent of the searches conducted, up 0.4 percentage points from October, followed by Yahoo! Sites (20.4 percent), Microsoft Sites (8.3 percent), Ask Network (4.0 percent), and AOL LLC (3.8 percent). Visit the comScore website to see their full findings.

comScore Core Search Report* November 2008 vs. October 2008 Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore qSearch 2.0
Core Search Entity	Share of Searches (%)
Core Search Entity	Oct-08	Nov-08	Point Change Nov-08 vs. Oct-08
Total Core Search	100.0	100.0	N/A
Google Sites	63.1	63.5	0.4
Yahoo! Sites	20.5	20.4	-0.1
Microsoft Sites	8.5	8.3	-0.2
Ask Network	4.2	4.0	-0.2
AOL LLC	3.7	3.8	0.1

* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

To Understand SEO, Get to Know Google First

When you pitch a new business prospect, you get to know a little about the company first. What business are they in? Who are their customers? Who are their competitors? How big is the company? And a million other things. You cater your pitch to appeal specifically to the prospect. The more you know in advance, the higher your odds of winning the account.

Well, it’s the same thing with search engine optimization (SEO). If you want to understand SEO, you first need to gain an understanding of how search engines work. And with a tight grip on 60+% of the search market, that means Google! Here’s a simplistic look at how Google works, from the 50,000 foot level.

Google has bots or spiders ─ programs it calls “Googlebots” ─ that “crawl” billions of web pages everyday. The Googlebots analyze the pages to determine what each page is about (keywords to match to your query) and the relevance of each page (incoming links from other pages that help determine the importance of the page). All this information is stored to create Google’s “index.” The index is constantly being updated to add new pages as well as to record changes to existing pages in the index.

When you place a keyword into a Google search box, Google checks its index to determine which pages are most relevant to the keyword and presents (or “serves”) a snippet of those pages in order of Google’s proprietary and highly complex ranking algorithm.

Here’s an illustration from Google that shows the search query process, which by the way, is usually executed in less than a half a second:

“Life of a Google Query” by Google

Think of SEO as a process of employing various techniques to:

3) closely match the content on web pages with targeted keywords

For a little more explanation of crawling, indexing and serving, check out what Google has to say on the subject. Soon you’ll be ready to make your pitch to Google.