Hey, Your Hat is a Nice Colour - Online Marketing Services and Their Ethical Dilemma

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by: Glenn J Tucker
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Word Count: 581
Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2011 Time: 12:50 AM
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An online presence is essential for any serious business - nowadays, when people have questions about your company that need answering, many will be tempted to visit your website before they resort to picking up the phone or visiting your premises. A website is of little value if your customers can't find it, though, and that's where online marketing services come in to the picture.

Online marketing services will use a variety of methods to get your business noticed in the competitive online marketplace - from improving your rankings on Google, Bing and Yahoo! with search engine optimisation (SEO), to handling pay per click advertising campaigns. But the internet is a crowded place, and just as in ‘real life', online marketing services will use any and all techniques to get your business noticed amongst the digital hustle and bustle.

So, on the one hand you have strictly ethical search engine optimisation techniques - known as white hat SEO. On the other hand, there are methods which are criticised by search engines - which is popularly called black hat SEO.
The term has its origins in black and white movies, when the villain would typically be identified by his black hat, whereas the ‘good guy' would wear a contrasting white hat.
The reality is not as clear as these Hollywood stereotypes make out, however - different online marketing services will use different degrees of white hat and black hat SEO, with varying success rates.

White Hat SEO

Online marketing services that chiefly employ white hat SEO can generally be described as being focused towards the end user. They will generate website content that is designed to be informative and clear at the potential cost of search engine rankings, and take a ‘what you see is what you get' attitude.
One of the main benefits of white hat SEO is that it tends to generate results that last for a long time. As search engine algorithms are becoming increasingly fine-tuned, the balance is tipping more and more in favour of white hat SEO. This makes white hat SEO a good choice for online marketing services who want to see long-term results.

Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO uses an assortment of techniques that search engines disapprove of - but which may produce superior results in the short term. Pages may have good search engine rankings to begin with, but as their black hat content is picked up on, they may be issued with penalties or a ban. This can result in decreased rankings or even the website disappearing from search engine results altogether.
Some of the black hat SEO techniques used by online marketing services include: spamming blogs with unrelated content to build links, creating content that includes large amounts of search keywords and makes little sense to the human reader, and hiding text on a website so that it is visible to search engines but not to the end user.

There are no cut-and-dry commandments for online marketing services, so many will use a combination of white hat and black hat search engine optimisation techniques to get the desired results. The important thing is to know which of the techniques will work for your business - do you go down the ethical road, or do you put on your black hat and join the dark side?

About the Author

Glenn Tucker writes about digital marketing techniques, hints and tips including search engine optimisation, Pay per click, Affiliate Marketing and other internet marketing services.

http://www.clickthrough-marketing.com provides information about digital marketing techniques, hints and tips including search engine optimisation, PPC, Affiliate Marketing and other internet marketing services.