Blackhat search engine optimisation is a label used in the search engine industry to describe techniques used to obtain high search engine rankings that are outside of the search engine guidelines. There is an inference that these techniques are immoral and unethical.

However, the guidelines are dynamic and always changing as search technology and the web develop - what is ‘whitehat’ one day could be blackhat the next. And, there are sometimes legitimate reasons for using a ‘blackhat’ technique.

What does this mean for the individual trying to promote their own site?

It’s all about risk verses results and common sense.

Having text hidden on a page by making the text colour the same as the background colour is very risky. It’s easy for search engines to detect and there is no legitimate reason for doing it.

Optimising ALT and TITLE attributes so they include keywords as well as being descriptive is lower risk. It’s difficult to detect and looks like good, careful coding although it could strictly be termed ‘keyword stuffing’.

If you want to know about more extreme blackhat SEO, check out SEO Black Hat.

‘Keyword stuffing’ is a general term for the unethical (or ‘Blackhat’) technique of repeating keywords and keyphrases within a webpage so that it ranks highly.

If you’ve read a little about on-site optimisation (see the basic SEO section of posts on this site) you might be tempted to try this, as at first glance it appears to be the answer to ranking highly.

However, search engines measure the keyword density of your pages (the number of times words appear on a page compared to the total number of words). If it is too high, they will consider the page spam and lower it’s ranking or remove it from the search engine results entirely.

Keyword stuffing can also make pages pretty horrible for user - remember, web pages are for people as well as search engines! You have to tread the line between making sure keywords are repeated in a page and keeping it readable.

Once you have decided on your keywords, the second stage in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is incorporating them into the design and content of your website. This is called ‘on-site’ or ‘on-page’ optimisation.

The search engines look at the whole of your site to determine which keywords are relevant to it, but the text within specific HTML tags on a page are given more ‘weight’. The list below is in a rough order of importance, but remember no one knows exactly how search engines rank pages so this isn’t gospel:

1. The title meta tag.
2. The content on the page (within p tags).
3. The anchor text of internal links.
4. The anchor text of external links.
5. The description meta tag.
6. The alt tags of images.
7. The H1 tag (and other heading tags).
8. The filenames of pages.
9. The filenames of images.
10. The title tags of links.

Most SEO experts agree the title meta tag and the description meta tag are particularly important.

These tags are also important because they are usually displayed in search engine results, so be careful when writing them. If they are just stuffed full of keywords searchers may not click on them. Conversely, a well written description tag can encourage a searcher to visit your site rather than a competitor (even if that competitor ranks above you in the search results).

In fact, you may be tempted to fill up the whole page with keywords because that’s what the search engines like, but this is a bad idea for a couple of reasons:

1. Search engines can easily detect this, decide the page is spam and ban your entire site from appearing in their results.
2. The page will be meaningless to a normal human being and they aren’t going to stick around on your site. In fact, they might go back and complain to the search engine about your site, again resulting in it being banned.

Conclusions

The main point to remember about using keywords is in web pages is that search engines like text; they can’t read photos or video or graphics. Of course, graphics make your site appealing to human beings, so you should use them, but remember to add text to the alt tags so the search engines will be able to read them.

Search engines also like structure. A website should be structured so that each page targets a particular key phrase with your homepage targeting the most important one.

It also helps human visitors to your site if each page is about a specific subject and broken up into clear, logical sections.