Black Hat SEO – A Bad Idea Disguised As A Cunning Plan

Since the development of Search Engine Optimisation as a concept, there has been a fairly obvious temptation for some people to try to rig the system in their favor by using the principles of SEO in a less-than-honest way. Because the idea of SEO is they keywords create cash, the idea that has occurred to a lot of people can best be summed up in the following sentence: “If they want keyword volume, we’ll give them keyword volume”. This tends to occur in the shape of website text that contains nothing but keywords.

Of course, this means that the website will be scarcely readable, if it is readable at all, but the trick is usually applied by webmasters who don’t really care if you actually read what is on the site. Usually they will use it as a landing page that immediately redirects you to the site they want you to read. It will happen instantly and you will not see the landing page, but it will have done its job. For the reader it may be little more than an inconvenience, but for other people operating in the same niche, it is cheating.

The main reason that tricks like this are a bad idea has only a small amount to do with the fact that it is cheating. In actual fact, it is incredibly limited as an SEO tool because Google and other search engines check for such tricks and will relegate any such site in their rankings – so not only is it dishonest, it is also ineffective, which is what will really stick in the craw of the people doing it.

Heavenly SEO Practices: Unique Content

The concept of unique content is inextricably linked to the issue of duplicate content. Duplicate content, even the most inexperienced of internet marketers will know, is a big no-no – even if the exact rules (and what qualifies as duplicate content) are a little blurred. Yet everyone knows that duplicate content is to be avoided if at all possible, so the phrase ‘unique content’ gets bandied about as the savior.

Yet what is duplicate content? It very much depends on your definition. For some, perhaps less experienced or professional internet marketers, unique content is simply a catch-all term that means any content that won’t receive a flag in a program such as CopyScape. That can mean that the content of the article (such as “how to build a doll house”) is exactly the same, only the words of the article are rearranged to appear in a different order, and thus pass CopyScape

Is that really unique content though? Probably not. Unique content, in the truest meaning of the word, is something that is truly unique. Something that has been written from scratch, by a human being, which imparts a previously undiscovered knowledge or opinion. That is the true meaning of unique content, and it’s websites that feature this kind of information that rank well in search engines.

Of course, if you’re working within a much written about niche, it’s hard to keep finding groundbreaking information to refer to continually. So perhaps the truth of unique content is somewhere in between the two extremes; content that is freshly written for the specific website by a human being, that may cover old ground, but at least does it in a useful and well written way.

What Is SEO?

“SEO” stands for “search engine optimization”, and as the name would suggest, it’s all about utilizing your website so that search engines can find it easily.

When someone searches for a website, they will key a few choice words in to their chosen search engine. For example, if they’re looking for a restaurant in New York, they’ll probably type something like: “good new york restaurant” or even just “new york restaurant”. SEO is all about making sure your website appears at the top of the search results for any given phrase like this.

Obviously the phrase is dependent on your niche, what you’re selling or what services you offer – but good SEO practices are about reducing your site down to those key words that people type into Google. There would be no point, in the example, for a great New York restaurant to have their website online but not have it come up under search results for “new york restaurant”.

However, with hundreds of thousands of websites online, there are literally thousands of pages that could turn up results for (again, using the example) “new york restaurant”. SEO is the method used to beat all the other websites, and get yourself as high in the search results as possible. As most users will tend to visit a website from the top three search results and completely neglect the rest, the efficacy of your SEO really can make or break the success of your website. And if your business in general is dependent on your website, then SEO can be the difference between success or failure in the business world.

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