White Hat, Black Hat

Do you like Western movies? For better understanding of this short article, you'll need a certain familiarity with the genre, or at the very least with one of its clichès. For this reason, allow us to refresh your memory for a moment.

Picture a duel scene: two unknown cowboys are facing each other in the street. Both of the characters are being introduced at this moment, and you don't know either of them: our question is, how do you tell the good guy from the bad guy? Anyone who's seen a lot of Western movies is raising their hand with a little smile, we know that. It's the easiest thing in the world: the cowboy wearing the black hat is tha bad guy, and the one with the white hat is the good one. A simple code to convey a simple piece of information: and now, when we'll mention Black hat SEO and White hat SEO, you will face no problems in understanding what we mean.

What still remains to be cleared up, though, is the term SEO... which is, actually, just an acronym for "Search Engine Optimization". And for the best explanation of what this is, we went and asked KLC, who's been in the SEO Business for years.

A Search Engine (think of Google, or Yahoo, or even old Altavista...) is the door which most web users use to find information - and thus, to decide which web site to visit. If on one hand, of course, those people who've been using the 'net for years have a group of websites they know and trust, and visit often for consultation, try and remember when we were all beginning, and doubtfully moving our first steps. Where did we go to search the data we needed?

It is clear that, this being the base situation, a Search Engine becomes an extraordinary opportunity for Companies, who can see a stream of new customers coming to visit their website. But the progressive crowding of the 'net has made it so that for any possible request, the results found by a search engine came to be hundreds, thousands, and finally millions... and so , hoping we'd be found stopped being enough. This is where the necessity of appearing among the very first results found by a search engine comes into play, and the two approaches we mentioned - white hat vs black hat - come out boldly onto the scene.

The white hat approact is simple: search engines were designed and built to suggest to the user what sites have the best chance of containing the date he's looking for. For this reason, the best way to be positioned well lies first of all in creating actually useful content for users and visitors, and then applying specific and actually quite complicated technical methods, often suggested by the search engine itself, to make it so that the automated systems on which the engines themselves are based may find and index that very content. In short, it's an approach which takes into account what the web is and who uses it.

As you may have inferred, on the other hand, we are a lot less friendly with the Black Hat approach. Black hat means trying to game the system, creating fake or unwanted links, or squeezing different, unrelated keywords in the content to attract potential visitors (ignoring the fact they will not find what they're looking for). We don't like it because it leads to monumental time-wasting, it ignores what the web is, and it is, generally speaking, deceitful and dishonest. And these are the same reasons why Search Engines don't like it very much, either, and actually punish the websites taking that approach (even when they are a "big player" - Google erased from its index the BMW website, for trying this kind of scam).

Of course, it is anyone's choice to decide which hat to wear. But it's a far better living in a village filled with white hats, don't you agree?