SEO Website Content Writing Techniques

Black Hat Versus White

"The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us to regain our equilibrium." ~ Norbet Platt

SEO copywriting for websites is a relatively straightforward procedure as long as you follow basic guidelines that search engines find legitimate. This means forgetting the hidden text or using irrelevant keywords and key phrases that score high on the uniqueness scale to gain you higher rankings.

The ‘black hat’ and ‘white hat’ SEO technique war has raged on for years, and search engines are becoming more stringent with those webmasters who use what they class as ‘under-handed’ techniques to gain instant top-rankings on search engines. In fact, Google™ has even started banning websites for using SEO techniques that they consider as unfavourable, and we are talking big business here, not small.

Did you know that BMW and Ricoh Germany were both banned from Google for using black hat SEO techniques in early 2007 and that it took both companies a considerable amount of time and effort to get themselves re-instated on the search engine?

While black hat SEO techniques do get instant results, you will find that using white hat SEO techniques will gain you far better longevity in terms of search engine rankings as well as  keep you in the ‘good books’ with search engines for many years too come.

Favourable white hat SEO techniques include:

• Using Original Content – If you want your website to be at the top of search engine rankings, then you have to fill your web pages with informative, well-written content rather than pages that are similar to others online. This means using keywords that are relevant to the page topic and not phrases that have been suggested by a keyword program.

• Keyword Selection – Using keywords in your website content is a must as this enables search engines to define what your content is about. For example, if you are a florist who is writing a web page on ‘how flowers are used in floral arrangements,’ then use the words, ‘flowers’ and ‘floral arrangements,’ throughout your webpage content in order to maximise your search engine ranking.

• SEO Copy and Good Grammar – Writing SEO content is slightly different to other writing in that certain words have to be repeated in order to gain a favourable search engine ranking; however, this does not mean that ‘good’ writing principles need to be forgotten.  Yes, SEO content can be grammatically correct and still be original and informative as well as contain a keyword density of 1-7%; the level of success just depends on the writer’s level of professionalism.

• Fresh Content – Building a website and then updating it once every few years will not gain you a favourable search engine rank; in fact, the opposite is true. To gain a favourable search engine ranking, you need to be frequently adding new content to your website. This means adding articles, press releases, and blog posts so that your website content is fresh, informative and plagiarism-free.

Overall, remember that black hat SEO techniques are ‘old school’ and, in order to compete in the ever-expanding world of online marketing, you need to search for ‘new techniques’ that continually test the Internet marketing waters.