No modern business today can grow without vigorous, even aggressive, online marketing. That’s simply the way the world works. So it is no wonder so many online marketing companies tout their ability to guarantee high google search engine ranking for your webpage. The thing is, these boasts are often fulfilled — at least on the short run. Within a few days you may well discover that your webpage is showing up at the top of the google search engine! Of course, within a few more days, or weeks, your website may well be banned by Google. Why? What happened?
What happened is that you just made the mistake of employing a black hat marketing company. They performed a search engine optimization of your site utilizing ethical (and quite possibly illegal) strategies such as keyword spamming without taking the trouble of offering actual content, and quite possibly proper grammar and syntax to your potential customers. Other black hat tactics include cookie stuffing, scraper blogs with no original content, widgets forcing visitors to automatically like or share the site on Facebook or other social media platforms, and gateway sites which are seen by the search engine but not the user. What all of these tactics have in common is that they rely on deception of both the user and the search engine and that they fail to deliver useful content.
Have you employed a black hat marketer? Then quite possibly, the reputation of your company has been tarnished. After all, the potential clients who have had the misfortune of surfing across your site know what a google-bait site looks like. They run into them every time they search for a product after all. Black hat marketers will seek to reassure you that the important thing is traffic to your site. Some of that traffic will statistically generate customers, after all. But at what cost?
White hat marketing, in contrast, focuses on providing potential customers with the useful information they are looking for (or should be looking for). On the long run this approach is far more rewarding than gaming the search engine to inflate traffic to the site. Beyond the backlash from potential customers misdirected to a black hat site, google and the other search engines are constantly on the prowl for offending websites, and when one is identified it is removed from the search results. Companies who seek rapid gains through black hat marketing can therefore only achieve short-term payoffs.
All this is not to say that white hat marketing will not make your site attractive for search spiders — but it will do so the right way, by writing content that will naturally include the relevant keywords within the information the users are looking for.
