When it comes to search engine optimization strategy, there are 2 schools of thought – namely the white hat SEO and the black hat SEO. White hat SEO strategy is devoted to providing quality content and create a great user experience. On the other hand, black hat SEO focus on using tricks to “fool” Google.

Google has a set of ethical quality guidelines and over the years, Google has increased the quality bar significantly and has successfully rooted out websites that produce poor quality content and are using black hat tactics.

Some of the black hat tactics include:

• Keyword stuffing, or cramming as many keywords as possible into the content
• Link farming, or set up of several websites to interlink to each other (watch the video below on how this violate Google quality guideline)
• Hidden text, or making text unseen by website users while search engines can still read it.
• Blog spam, or leaving random messages in the comments section of popular blogs that link back to another site.

Black hat SEO tactics may boost your site’s ranking in the short term. But very soon Google will notice it and then it will be game-over when Google banned your site. White hat SEO on the other hand, put your audience first by creating useful and quality content that the audience will love and share.

Therefore, here’s the take-home message – Original, audience-focused crafted content will outrank black hat SEO tricks in the long run.