Check Black Hat Tactics at the Portal

SEO is all good, right? Not Black Hat SEO. SEO tactics that are banned can take your site right down with them if you get caught. It’s best just to avoid anything that could be construed as shades of gray, and stick with proven white hat tactics to get your site moving up the SERPs.

Whether you are doing your SEO yourself by listening to the advice of various ‘gurus’ or hiring it out, you need to watch your back and not get pulled into black hat measures just to see fast results. In the long run, you will only hurt your site, and could end up penalized severely for trying to game the search engines.

You don’t want to pay for any links, spam search engines, blogs or forums, pay for dishonest reviews, link to disreputable mass linking schemes, use white on white text, keyword stuffing or other activities. It’s just not worth it.

Instead, concentrate your efforts on the tried and true business of organic linking, article marketing and judicious social book-marking. Produce plenty of relevant, informational content and carve out a niche for yourself of which you are the leading expert.

Articles, press releases, web content, blogging, Squidoo lenses, Knols, videos graphics and other types of content can be optimized with a common goal – making the signposts on the web point to you as the most relevant result in your field.

This means research – choosing a niche, finding long tail keywords, running an effective ad campaign, and optimizing content as well for any affiliates you might wish to partner with.

It also means hard work – you have to follow through, even if you are using a company to handle a lot of it for you. You want to be sure that they are not using any uncertified methods to get fast results and make you pleased with their work, only to be banned three months later!

Once you have your head straight about white and black hat SEO, you can ask yourself every time you get ready to do something new, “Is this relevant? Is it helpful? Anything that helps the USER is usually agood thing.

If you keep your nose clean and watch your step, you can build a solid foundation for your site. Anything else is bound to crumble away. White hat SEO is the ONLY approved way to build a site!