Which is Better, Grey Hat SEO or White Hat SEO?

1. What is White Hat SEO?

White Hat SEO is the practice of building high-quality, relevant websites to attract customers. White Hat SEO focuses on creating content that is not just appealing to users but also to search engines, which is why it's sometimes called search engine optimization.

On the simplistic side.

White Hat SEO can be thought of as content creation or keyword research that attracts links, naturally growing your brand online.

On the more complex side...

White Hat SEO is actually more like market research before a purchase, not engagement, and includes looking into sites outbound from your own, as well as analyzing sites outbound to yours. Landing pages are non-ideal examples in this sense, often without any real connection to the "price and features," your visitors are buying or wanting.

To get this tone right, there's a number of things you need to know:

Your analytics and strategy. (Yes, consider keyword targets as part of your analytics strategy, not the entire picture.)

Google search volume trends and trends across the content types in your site. (Look at this Search Engine Land post for more.)

Second-order effects. (This is especially relevant if you may have been wading into previously untapped niches that look way more attractive now than they did when you started.) Think about products, services, and trends getting "trendier" the more of your previous customers use or have used them already, even if you didn't intentionally promote them or target them. It's not a matter of if becoming a trendsetter will help you rank in search results: it's a matter of when. It's a pulsing expanse of previously unexploited markets (see #9) that are only going to get more and more enticing the more people who have already discovered them are in them.)

Why does this matter to digital marketers?

Some SEO – especially the more "advanced" kinds – are really into brand building. Some marketers don't realize that surpassing your competitors (globally) with quality content is also good for business.

2. What is Grey Hat SEO?

Grey Hat SEO is a way to improve your site’s ranking in Google without violating any of Google’s rules and guidelines. It’s the middle way between White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO. The name is based on the TV show “White Collar Comedy,” where the main character pulls off the same type of web show manipulation that most SEOs practice. This includes:

 Rank-changing techniques that dramatically boost the ranking of a site instead of hurting it.

 Tool-based web shows and techniques like dirty tactics, click fraud, and so on.

 Fee-for-service services that help find competitors for your website so you can get and increase their rankings.

Action-based SEO tools that help computer hackers help your own website rank better.

White hat SEO is when you ensure that the SEO issues that you’re dealing with are the ones Google wants to fix and nothing more. SEO professionals focus on:

Changing the content on a site to meet the standards Google has determined to be decent/ideal. 

Remembering the following points:

If you match keyword intent to your content then no content creation is necessary and everything Google is showing you matches the intent. Choosing keyword content wisely, matching your content to your possible goals, making your content easily readable and engaging can result in better rankings.

Making sure unimportant pages are in crawlable states, that are easily marked up with meta tags, canonical tags, filename tagging, XML Sitemap, and no duplicate content. 

Adding available tools to help perform SEO tasks. Tools like:

Schema “markup” generator to mark up your content properly.

XML Sitemap generator to easily see if Google can access the site.

Attribution Editor to keep track of where well-targeted new links pointing to your site.

Page-level and domain level robots.txt files to make sure not to block certain URLs from being crawled.

3. How to use White Hat vs. Grey Hat SEO

White Hat SEO is when you focus on creating quality, unique content that adds value to the internet. Grey Hat SEO is when you use tactics that may be frowned upon, like keyword stuffing or link building, but aren’t necessarily against Google’s rules.

It is possible to do both, but difficult to do at an elite level because it takes a lot of knowledge, effort, and time. Let’s assume you can pull it off. Now you have to figure out how you can do it, and what is the best way for you to get there? Here is the checklist you have to meet or exceed.1. No cloaking

Google is very clear that implementing cloaking violates site stabilization and quality guidelines. As an SEO consultant, it's not enough to merely avoid cloaking, you need to be completely transparent to your visitors. Unfortunately, most organizations lack the expertise to discuss the issue on an industry level because it is complex and you need the client to understand it (not to mention that it is only the unicorns and rainbows that Google deems standing by their guidelines… *wink*). So in reality, you just sit back and hope that your clients get it. If they don’t, congrats, they are the unicorns and rainbows! Except bringing in a real SEO consultant isn’t going to help your chances are your client is going to fire you because you failed at implementing it correctly. You need to work through figuring out how to implement it and make sure your website pages don’t have any search engine visibility based on cloaking.2. Footer links & comment spam

These are probably the two best ways to randomly run into guidelines violations by randomly submitting your site. With comment spam, you are flooding a comment section with links and optimized keywords. Google’s guidelines state "No one has the right to editorialize another individual’s personal opinion without having first obtained permission from the individual concerned.

4. How to be successful with both styles of SEO

SEO can be broken down into two different categories: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Off-page SEO is centered around building relationships and links to your site, and it’s the most important type of SEO. But the most important thing to remember about SEO is that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. That means that if you're going to chase micro-conversions or get links to a page that already has authority, you better be ready to grind it out for a long time. There are various ways of approaching on-page SEO — comment SEO, title SEO, using keywords in titles, avoiding keywords, etc. However, these methods either require energy and a lot of time or do not offer a lot of return for the time invested. On a similar note, on-page and off-page should never be done at the same time! For example, having a great on-page meta description is a huge benefit for your user experience, which is one of your on-page goals — don’t ignore it! Additionally, blogging about your business, social media, offering commentary on industry news, or even just participating in community building projects that have authority (which is another on-page goal) will put you in a great position to build links and social activity. It will also engage with an audience and give you a platform to share valuable information. While it does take some time and effort, it’s well worth it and results in a great return for quality time and effort. On the other hand, if you are only focusing on backlinks with no SEO efforts, it might be a waste of time and effort. 2. Every page speech should be optimized. If your page is driven by JavaScript, crawlers won’t be able to read the content in its entirety. Thus, the first action that you need to take is to make sure that all content on the page, including headers, body content, and footer content, is properly optimized.