One reason why many people find SEO a bit difficult and frightening is because it can be quite a jargon-heavy discipline, filled with its own words and phrases that may sound complicated but in fact are used to describe pretty simple stuff. 

Many aspiring digital marketers may have heard phrases such as black hat SEO or white label SEO and have scratched their heads wondering what it all means. Well in this article, the various types of ‘hats’ of SEO are going to be explained, as well as a few related terms that are impossible to ignore. 

Black Hat SEO 

The hats are basically ways to rank SEO tactics and techniques in how well they line up with , which are basically rules that digital marketers can use to help their stuff rank higher on Google. Black hat SEO is used to refer to techniques that disregard these guidelines and that don’t follow them and potentially even infringe on them. 

In short, black hat SEO techniques are the stuff that you don’t want to be doing, and examples of it can include keyword stuffing, duplicate content, link spamming and hidden text. The reason these techniques are bad, frowned upon and unwanted is because they’re misleading and offer no value to the user. With Google being so advanced in spotting these tactics, doing these things have an increased risk of devaluing your SEO and making your pages fall lower in the rankings.  

Due to how effective black hat SEO was around a decade ago, because of how less advanced Google and other search engines were, many people still attempt these tactics to boost their SEO, however, they’re pretty much ineffective and do more harm and good, so be sure to stay away from this type of SEO. 

White Hat SEO

In contrast to black hat SEO, white hat SEO is where the practice abides by Google’s standards. The goal of using white hat SEO is to increase organic search rankings and to do so via the best practices, to ensure that the content is both high-quality but also effective. 

To be considered white hat, techniques shouldn’t violate any search engine guidelines and should also not use any underhand tactics to garner rankings or links through manipulative ways. Doing SEO this way is a great way to create a long-term and effective SEO strategy. Some of the best white hat techniques include making your webpages mobile friendly, writing relevant content that readers actually want, as well as getting backlinks from reputable sites. That last part is very hard to do, so many businesses hire the services of an SEO reseller like Click Intelligence, which have relationships with many different quality publishing sites and can publish awesome content on those sites to build valuable backlinks.

Grey Hat SEO 

Where there is black and white there also has to be a shade of grey. Grey hat SEO can be described as taking legitimate, acceptable white hat techniques, but contravening Google’s webmaster guidelines in order to make these techniques more effective. 

In essence, it’s simply bending the rules, and depending on how these tactics are used, some people accept grey hat SEO as an okay thing to do, while others are equally as against it as they are black hat.