Now that we are firmly entrenched in the digital age where almost everything lives and dies by the Internet, it is crucial that your business is taking full advantage of every opportunity possible. Every aspect ranging from social media campaigns to email marketing can have huge impacts on the success of your company. While big name companies often benefit from name recognition; small, lesser-known companies can benefit greatly from a digital marketing technique called search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the use of strategies to increase a website’s search engine ranking placement, which ultimately increases the number of visitors to the website. The higher a website appears on a search engine results page, the company is better of in terms of traffic received. There are very specific strategies and tactics that can be used to increase a websites ranking; strategies like natural SEO. There is also a way, for a lack of better words, to “cheat” the system by using techniques referred to as black hat SEO tactics. Below will explain the difference between both techniques and why you should stay away from using the black hat strategies at all costs.
Natural SEO
Search engines use complicated algorithms that generate results for whatever someone happens to be searching for. Natural SEO refers to the tactics that are used to achieve higher rankings on the search engine results. Methods such as integrating keywords, backlinking and posting high-quality content to your website is a great way to improve the search results ranking. Natural SEO may be a slower process to buildup a high ranking, but in the long run, your results will last. Sure you can pay to have your website pop up at the top of the search results page, but that costs money and only guarantees one-time visitors. The content on your site should be of high quality and filled with targeted keywords that fit with the context of your website that the search engines pick up. Proper and relevant use of backlinks to connect back to your page from other pages and websites is also a great tool to use. Fresh and engaging content is another great way to truly build a lasting ranking and generate a loyal following. The term natural or organic refers to the process that it takes to build a quality-driven ranking, which is free from tricks and shortcuts. It may seem slow, but over time it will grow and be more than worth the time.
Black Hat SEO
In the world of SEO, it is often strongly encouraged that 
companies stay away from giving in and using black hat SEO techniques to artificially boost their website rankings quicker than natural SEO methods. These techniques are often used to cheat or trick the search engines algorithms that generate the search results based on quality. Such bad SEO practices include buying backlinks or creating a backlink pyramids from a bunch of fake websites. Keyword stuffing, which is just filling your pages with keywords out of context that will generate search engine hits but does not actually fit with the content of your website or hiding keywords on your web pages that are super tiny or the same color as your background. Using copied or stolen content from other websites to make your site look like it has updated and fresh content. While these may be great ways to generate an inflated ranking but there are a few reasons why these do a lot of harm for your websites credibility. Google and other top search engines are consistently updating their algorithms to weed out and penalize websites that use these tricks because not only does it cheat out quality websites, users end up getting frustrated with top results that are not relevant to what they are looking for, which hurts the search engine. As a way to reduce the use of these tricks, the search engines penalize such websites thus making it even more difficult to gain a good ranking even with proper techniques.
While some digital marketing firms may promise guaranteed search engine rankings, you should be weary of how they do so. Black hat techniques can give you a good ranking, for a short time, but in the long run, hurt your website more than it helps. EM360 provides proven results using both organic SEO and paid search for clients, to request your proposal today, visit https://em360dev.wpengine.com/rfp/. To stay on top of SEO and Social Media trends, subscribe to our blog today!
