Search engine optimisation (or optimization if you insist) is the process of making sure that the search engines understand, qualify and index the content of your website.
I recently attended a presentation on black hat SEO that I found interesting. The speaker clearly knew a lot about the darker side of SEO, but his polarised views were more than little disconcerting.
For example he considered so-called White hat SEOs to be “losers”, and frequently referred to Matt Cutts of Google disparagingly and with a surprising level of venom.
SEO is about helping the search engines understand the visitors that you want on your website.
Like any business relationship this can be anywhere on a scale from absolute honesty to complete deception. But no-one can dispute that black hat techniques carry a degree of risk.
A black hat SEO may argue that the rewards outweigh the risks, but if you’re contemplating following the dark side, you might want to think about what you’ll be gambling.
If SEO is about making sure the engines index your content, there should be no room for techniques that jeopardise that aim.
The dark side might be tempting, but the good guys usually win.
Note: The next issue of our Competitive Edge newsletter will be covering this issue and some of the finer details of practical and safe search engine optimisation.
