When you are working on your search engine optimisation you will be faced with a dilemma: Should you use black hat or white hat link building techniques?
White hat techniques involve earning links back to your site through producing great products and great content that other web masters want to link to. Black hat techniques involve taking advantage of loop holes in search engine algorithms in order to artificially push a website up the rankings.
There are pros and cons of both techniques, here is a summary:
White Hat
Pros
- Google is constantly updating the search algorithms. If you use white hat techniques you won\’t experience sudden drops with new updates or receive manual penalties against your website.
- You will gain targeted traffic to your website, meaning you will receive potential customers as well as links to your website.
- Your links will be from high quality websites that will give you good brand exposure.
- Once you have earned a high quality link it will encourage other sites to link to you.
Cons
- White hat techniques are time consuming.
- It can be several months before you notice a difference in rankings.
- You have to create something great in order to gain links.
Black Hat
Pros
- You can expect results more quickly.
Cons
- You are likely to drop from the rankings at any point.
- You will end up with very negative brand associations.
- You will not receive website traffic from the links.
- Undoing black hat techniques is a very long, expensive and time consuming process.
At South Wales Web Solutions we recommend using white hat SEO techniques in order to achieve long lasting results that will see your business through many years to come. For more information please contact us.