SEO Practices are divided into two types:
- White Hat Techniques
- Black Hat Techniques
are the techniques that are recommended by search engines, to enhance the quality of the website traffic by using good practice techniques in design and developmentand to make the website more appealing to visitors.
Usually, in white hat techniques the SEO aspects are involved in every step through the way from analysis to the development passing by designing, hosting, domain name selection and promotion.
SEO Activities:
- Review of your site content or structure.
- Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages.
- Content development.
- content enhancing.
- Management of online business development campaigns.
- Keyword research.
- SEO training.
- Expertise in specific markets and geographies.
- organic natural web design and development.
- fixing content.
BTW: Abiding to the W3C Design Guidelines is not an answer to your SEO issues, But of course abiding to the W3c standards will not hold back your SEO activities on the contrary it will enhance your site from within.
the most important W3C standard that concern content is the accessibility guidelines.
Black Hat Techniques (spamdexing):
black hat techniques are more concerned with spamming or fooling the search engine indexing algorithms by studying the algorithms' methodology and use these knowledge to cram the black hat site in search engines in a process called spamdexing.The earliest known reference to the term spamdexing is by Eric Convey in his article "Porn sneaks way back on Web," The Boston Herald, May 22, 1996, where he said:
The problem arises when site operators load their Web pages with hundreds of extraneous terms so search engines will list them among legitimate addresses. The process is called "spamdexing," a combination of spamming — the Internet term for sending users unsolicited information — and "indexing."
Common spamdexing techniques can be classified into two broad classes: content spam (or term spam) and link spam.
Content Spam:
The problem arises when site operators load their Web pages with hundreds of extraneous terms so search engines will list them among legitimate addresses. The process is called "spamdexing," a combination of spamming — the Internet term for sending users unsolicited information — and "indexing."
Common spamdexing techniques can be classified into two broad classes: content spam (or term spam) and link spam.
Content Spam:
- Keyword stuffing: it is the stuffing of keywords deliberately in the pages whether hidden or visible to make the page appear to search engine crawler as legitimate page for the chosen keywords, this technique manipulates the older indexing algorithms which were built for counting the wordings in the page to determine the density of a given web page and upon the counting the rank is determined.
- Hidden or invisible for unrelated texts: usually, by tiny texts, background colored texts, off-margin DIV tags, zero-height zero-width DIV tags Or using No script Section, No Frame Section.
- Meta tag stuffing: using the meta tags to stuff keywords that are unrelated to the site content.
- Gateway Or Doorway pages: Creating low-quality web pages that contain very little content but are instead stuffed with very similar keywords and phrases. They are designed to rank highly within the search results, but serve no purpose to visitors looking for information.
- Scraper sites: are websites built using programs that scrape data Or wordings from various websites or search engines and pack these search words together in a website, this type of websites is also called "built for Adsense" as the name suggests the website usually contains Adsense Ads that are integrated within the site content.
- Link farms: Creating a close network of links within separated pages.
- Hidden links: Putting links where they won't be seen in order to increase link popularity. Highlighted link text can help rank a webpage higher for matching that phrase.
- Sybil attack: This is the forging of multiple identities for malicious intent. A spammer may create multiple web sites at different domain names that all link to each other, such as fake blogs known as spam blogs.
- Spam blogs: Spam blogs, also known as splogs, are fake blogs created solely for spamming, by redirecting users by links to the main spamdexed site, They are similar in nature to link farms.
- page hijacking: This is achieved by creating a rogue copy of a popular website which shows contents similar to the original to a web crawler but redirects web surfers to unrelated or malicious websites, this considered more like phishing than page hijacking as SEO Technique, yet phishing is going further in scamming the visitors in a cyber crime. page hijacking is considered a type of cloaking.
- buying expired domains: Some link spammers monitor DNS records for domains that will expire soon, then buy them when they expire and replace the pages with links to their pages. Now Google resets the link data on expired domains, which is somewhat important aspect to take care if you are a fellow webmaster, Rule1: don't let your Domain Name Expire.
- Cookie stuffing: This involves placing an affiliate tracking cookie on a website visitor's computer without their knowledge, which will then generate revenue for the person doing the cookie stuffing. This not only generates fraudulent affiliate sales, but also has the potential to overwrite other affiliates' cookies, essentially stealing their legitimately earned commissions, this earnings are realized when a user is registered to the business website.
- Spam in blogs: This is the placing or solicitation of links randomly on other sites, usually blog comments, guestbooks and forums.
- Comment spam: is a form of link spam that has arisen in web pages that allow dynamic user editing such as wikis, blogs, and guestbooks. and it is similar to the spam in blogs
- Wiki spam: Using the open edit-ability of wiki systems to place links from the wiki site to the spam site. The subject of the spam site is often unrelated to the wiki page where the link is added, and this technique is also called Vandalis.
- Referrer log spamming: referrer-log spam may be used to increase the search engine rankings of the spammer's sites, by getting the referrer logs of many sites to link to them.By having a robot randomly access many sites enough times, with a message or specific address given as the referrer, that message or Internet address then appears in the referrer log of those sites that have referrer logs.
- Mirror websites: Hosting of multiple websites all with conceptually similar content but using different URLs. Some search engines give a higher rank to results where the keyword searched for appears in the URL.
- URL redirecting: Taking the user to another page without his or her intervention, e.g., using META refresh tags, Flash, JavaScript, Java or Server side redirects
- Cloaking: Cloaking refers to any of several means to serve a page to the search-engine spider that is different from that seen by human users. It can be an attempt to mislead search engines regarding the content on a particular web site. Cloaking, however, can also be used to ethically increase accessibility of a site to users with disabilities or provide human users with content that search engines aren't able to process or parse. It is also used to deliver content based on a user's location; Google itself uses IP delivery, a form of cloaking, to deliver results. Another form of cloaking is code swapping, i.e., optimizing a page for top ranking and then swapping another page in its place once a top ranking is achieved.
