Once you’ve finished with the nitty-gritty of setting up
your business and are ready to hit the web, you come to the next problem, a
rather major one: no-one on the internet knows who you are. In order for people
to start finding you, you’re going to have to figure out a way to get yourself indexed
on the various search engines that people use to sift through the internet.
Thankfully there’s already a field of industry that covers this niche, and that
is the process of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO uses a variety of
different techniques that work towards the same endgame: your website, highly
ranked on Google. But! Not all of these techniques are what you might call good – they’re effective, sure, but
morally, they might leave something to be desired. These techniques are known
as black hat techniques, the modern wild west of the internet having
appropriately absorbed the nomenclature of villainy that a man in a black hat
represented in Hollywood’s classic westerns. Similarly, the better SEO
techniques are known as white hat; we’ll get to them later. First, let’s meet
the villains.
The Black Hat Gang
Probably the very worst thing about the gang of vagabond
techniques that represent black hat SEO is how obvious they are. The most
sinister offender, the ringleader of the gang, is probably keyword stuffing,
the technique of shoving whatever particular word or term it is that you’re
looking to pop up in search results for into a text as many times as possible.
This is the text-based equivalent of when you get sent to a dodgy website to
download something and are greeted by fifteen different ‘download’ buttons in
various fonts and styles, each of which is poised and ready to ruin your day
with popups and malware. If my keyword was keyword, then using the keyword keyword
as many times as possible ends up with sentences like this one, which feature
the keyword keyword so many times that the keyword keyword starts to seem like
it’s haunting you, keyword. This is no use to anybody, because it makes your
content look amateur and doesn’t actually help anyone who finds it. What’s the
point of being the top result for ‘western metaphors in SEO’ if someone who is
looking for information clicks on it and finds garbage? Well, you got a click;
if that’s all you’re after, congratulations. But we can do better!
Other black hat techniques include the application of tiny,
hidden text, links that don’t look like links and will, upon accidental click,
send the browser off on another adventure, sneaky redirects, and the incredibly
cheeky act of directly changing the content of a page once it’s been indexed!
The White Hat Sheriff
The real heroes of SEO are the ones who wear the white hats,
and who outdo the black hat outlaws simply by being better than them. The true
sheriff, the most important difference between black hat and white hat SEO, is a
focus on user experience. Implement keywords, sure, but where they’re relevant.
Focus on putting together a quality piece of content that helps the person
who’s searching for those keywords; if the second best result for ‘western
metaphors in SEO’ is a complex treatment of the theme, then that disgruntled
user who clicked off the previous result is more likely to stick around – and
time spent on a page is just as important as the initial click that gets us
there. So write like a human, not like a robot that got stuck repeating keyword
keyword keyword.
The search engines themselves are designed to reward this
kind of content; thanks to the continued evolution of machine learning, their
algorithms are getting smarter at detecting context all the time. Google can
tell the difference between keyword spam and a well-written sentence, and will
sort accordingly; good content goes up, bad content goes down, and the worst
content might even get removed if it’s judged to be suitably unethical in its
SEO applications. The Black Hat Gang will, inevitably, end up in internet jail.
The idea of user experience goes beyond the text, as well. It’s
also about presentation; if your content is pleasing to the eye, it’s pleasing
to the owner of that eye as well. So optimise! Design a website that looks
good, reads well, and presents itself nicely on computer screens, phones,
tablets; any conceivable means by which people might visit it. Then apply some
of the other white hat SEO techniques: pop keywords into URLs, use keyword tails
that search engines themselves suggest, curate strong, legitimate backlinks;
even something as simple as having a website that loads quickly is a boon. All
of these techniques, when used well, will drown out the black hats, and send
your content to the top.
The Taming of the West
The web is different now to the dark days of the early
2000’s, when the black hats had an easy time of it. SEO isn’t just about
language anymore; search engine results aren’t driven by how many times one can
stuff variations of a keyword into a text. Nowadays, the most important difference
between black hat and white hat SEO techniques is that one type has a future.
Here in the dying days of the new west, the black hats are the last few
cowboys, clinging to a land of lawlessness that is slowly being tamed and
remade into a civilised land of quality content, with reputable locales that
are linked by serviceable infrastructure and curated by good people. It might not
make for as exciting movies, but at least we can find what we need!
