White Hat or Black Hat SEO Techniques

Do you know what is 'Hide & Seek'?

If 'No'.

Let me give you a clue.

It is a game that you might have played in your childhood days.

What is SEO?

The same theory relates to SEO.

It is all about searching a website through a search engine on the internet.

SEO is an optimization process (clue) that helps search engines in identifying or verifying, indexing and crawling a specific website available on the internet. This technique helps in improving the visibility of the website or web page on the internet.

SEO pays attention to the keywords typed into search engine, how search engines work, what people search for, and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience.

It includes On Page Optimization techniques as well Off-page Optimization techniques.

How to SEO?

We can primarily categories SEO techniques into following two broad categories:

1. White Hat Techniques
2. Black Hat Techniques

White Hat Techniques:

White Hat means pure techniques. It means to follow those guidelines which are widely approved by search engines for optimization purpose and involves no deception. The following ensures the white hat technique:

1. Use of quality content in the website;
2. Proper use of heading element;
3. Use of meta tags and meta description;
4. Quality inbound links;
5. Use of social media:  Facebook, g+, Twitter, Linkedin, Digg, Reddit, etc;
6. Email marketing (Mailing to subscribers only) i.e. not spamming;
7. Use of Blogs (Google's blogspot, Wordpress, Yahoo's Tumblr, Quora and linkedin plu etc.);
8. Adding URLs to Web Directories as ODP, Yahoo Directory, etc.;
9. Use of Content Management System;
10. Optimization of videos and pictures
11. Optimum use of relevant key words.

Black Hat Techniques:

This technique is contrary to the White Hat Technique. It is not indexing but spam-dexing.

Following are some of the black hat techniques:

1. Hidden Content: The hidden text, either written in a tinny font or of same colour of the web page or hiding it within html code such as "no frame" sections, alt attributes, zero-sized HTML Divs, and "no script" sections.
2. Meta Tags Stuffing: Using unrelated Meta tags to the website's content.
3. Incorrect use of Meta Description: Description is promotional and contains a specific keyword only. It should be descriptive in two to three sentences.
4. Gateway Pages: Designed for search engines not for end users.
5. Scraper Sites: Developed with the use of various programmes designed to scrap search engine results
6. Link Farming : To list links of unrelated web pages.
7. Link Spamming
8. Use of Link Building Softwares
9. Buying Expired Domains
10. Cookie Stuffing: Placing an affiliate tracking code on the users computer without his knowledge.
11. Forum Spaming: inserting links to the editable websites.
12. Comment spaming
13. Spamming in Blogs
14. Mirror websites
15. URL Redirection 

Read Also: Learn On-Page Optimization

1. Voice Search on Google Search,  
2. Learn On Page Optimization,
3. Custom Search Engine, 
4. Google Algorithm-Autocomplete

Why We Choose Google's Custom Search Engine?

It’s my privilege to introduce you with the topic of custom search engine i.e. CSE.  I feel that you may be aware of search engines and their functions, but if not, we should learn about search engines before learning about CSE:

Search Engine:  It is quite difficult for a layman to find out the relevant information on www (W3) in absence of any search engine as there are trillion of web pages on W3. All these web pages contain certain information for its users.  Search engine helps us to ascertain/search the actual information available

Search Engines

on internet.  However, they can crawl and index a website only if that website has added their Meta verification tag, etc.  The html Meta tag of a search engine can be ascertained with the help of its Web Master.  If you are not interested to add any Meta Tag, etc. in your website, you may opt to add or to suggest your website’s URL in the most appropriate category of DMOZ - the oldest website directory.  A user should strictly follow DMOZ guidelines while suggesting their website.

There are many search engines in W3 e.g. Google, Yahoo, Baidu, Excite, Ask, AOL, Soso and Yandex, etc. However, Google is the most popular search engine on W3 with a market share of 68.9%.

What is the use of a Custom Search Engine?

CSE helps your users to search any information on your website as well as on W3 also.  Perhaps, you may have observed many websites and blogs, which have their own search boxes but maybe you are not aware of their functionality and benefits. Such type of search box is called Custom Search Engine i.e. CSE and it helps to search any information on a specific website or blog.  The CSE in the name of a specific website helps to develop its brand.

Custom Search Engines

It facilitates your users not to open a new search engine time and again to find out any information.  It makes your website users’ friendly.  One of the best advantages of CSE in a website is that it helps to grow significant keywords for your web pages.  More the significant keywords bring more the chances of promoting your website in search results for those relevant keywords.  The search engine may take clue from their significance for its Autocompletion algorithm. The Autocompletion is a magic feature of search engine that promotes further a website in its search results.

How to Create Google's Custom Search Engine?

Simply, follow the following steps to create a search engine for your website or blog:-

1)      Go to Google’s website of CSE;

2)      Click at ‘New Search Engine’;

3)      You should add your web address in ‘Site to Search’ box.  The website shall be submitted in a (www.crispwriters.com/*) form to include all URLs of www.crispwriters.com or crispwriters.com.  For including all sub-domains of a website, you should submit as *.crispwriters.com/*. For including all URLs that contain the word ‘articles’ *.crispwriters.com*articles ;

4)      Select your language;

5)      Name your search engine;

6)      Then click create your own search engine;

7)      For excluding any website : 1) Go to main page of CSE, 2) Click Setup, 3) Click Advance option in Basic Tab, 4) To exclude a specific URL, type the specific URL and to exclude Multiple URLs, use Exclude sites in bulk.  At the end, please don’t forget to click save.

8)      You can now use ‘CSE Creation from Keywords Tools’ also. This tool helps to create a search engine that can search specific websites or specific web pages on a specific topic. It allows adding maximum 50 keywords of 100 characters each which best define or describing the topic. The keywords can be words or phrases.  Multiple keywords should be separated by commas. CSE supports only ascii characters for keywords. The link to create CSE from keywords tools is: ‘https://www.google.co.in/cse/create/fromkwsetname’;

9)      When you click on ‘Expand Keywords’ you will find that each keyword has been expanded and grouped in many groups.  You can review each group by clicking on it and if that group is not required, you may delete the specific group.  However, you should add a specific keyword to remove that in ‘Negative Terms’;

10)   If you choose to upgrade your CSE, you can make money by connecting your account to Google Adsense. Whenever any user clicks on an advertisement shown in your search results, Google will share its revenue with you.  It also helps to immediate index URLs as per the indexing quota. You can purchase upgraded CSE by paying $100 per year to $ 2000 per year for search queries from 20000 per year to 500000 queries per year respectively;

 Read Also: 

1. Voice Search on Google Search, 
2.  Autocomplete - Google Algorithm,
3.  Learn On-Page Optimization.