The Advantage of Using White Hats

Some may have argued that the use of black hat tactics can bring about faster results in terms of search engine rankings, earlier increase in visitor traffic, and lower costs to pay. These proponents argue that since search engines tend to take some time to update their indexes and analyze reports, they can erase their tracks once these get wind of what they're doing.

However how attractive these arguments are, it cannot be denied that black hat tactics alienate clients from their customers, which results in negative user experiences and greater costs in the long run. And although search engines do update their indexes once in like three or four months, feedback from users can spur a response from them in a matter of hours. Also, the short term gain from using these tactics is offset by the total cost of repairing the reputation of a site damaged by it. That's the reason why white hat tactics are the more accepted norm.

According to Wikipedia, a search engine optimization technique is considered white hat SEO if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. We can say the legal SEO is a white hat SEO. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical.

To make things simpler, white hat SEO is people-oriented. They aim to provide the best user-experience by making sure that the stuff search engines rank them for are the same stuff people are searching for. Despite it being time-consuming, inconvenient for some to practice, and takes a long time to see results, the long-term benefits of using white hat strategies is immense. And that is alone is enough to convince clients and SEO's to continue using them.