White Hat SEO and Why it Always Wins in the End

We've all seen those films where the man with the white hat wins. We've see
Gary Cooper defy the arrival of the train at High Noon. Poor Gary almost gets laughed out of town with his white hat, but we know that in the end he'll win through, and his victory is all the greater for taking the tougher road. But High Noon was just a film, and how can this really effect the world of online marketing?

The basic difference between the practices lies in how the two opposing camps are willing to create back links. Search Engines operate and rank content according to their algorithms and laws, it is in their interest to make sure all content is quality to make sure their customers have the best results, White Hat SEO will stick stringently to those rules to support customer service, whereas Black Hat are willing to flout the rules and trick them for cheaper results despite the system. Short cutting and beating a few of Google's rules might not seem like the worst thing in the world, simply trying to get cheaper, more immediate results.

Black Hat might seem like canny corner cutting, but ultimately it creates poor quality, spam content and clever modern customers can tell.

White Hat however is a constructive method that, although might take a little longer to write the best back-link material and find the most appropriate websites to publish with, builds customer confidence and secures long term results. When a customer enjoys a high quality article they are more likely to follow the links, they are more likely to trust the information from online services and they are more likely to become regular customers.

So although black hat spamming can reach far more people at once, a spam campaign might reach 10,000 people and only need to trick 10% to receive 1000 clicks, therefore improving the search rankings briefly but annoying the customers and running the severe risk of eventually getting penalised by Google. With White Hat however a campaign might only reach 1000 people, but they are specifically targeted and because of the higher quality a higher proportion will not only use the links but become customers and regularly re-visit.

So Black Hat might seem easier, but in the long term will spoil the internet for everyone else, whereas White Hat takes a little longer but produces customers of a much higher quality for long term search engine success.