Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short is a popular Internet Marketing method; if applied correctly SEO will increase the natural search engine rankings of a website. There are many search engine optimisation agencies out there who can you trust? Who will give you the right service at the right price? The UK SEO Agency are a small, dedicated search engine optimisation specialist. We provide a full professional service to all our clients, each client are assigned to an SEO specialist, who is the most experienced in their industry. The UK SEO Agency are proud to say we ONLY practice Ethical White Hat SEO. Unfortunately not all SEO agencies share our beliefs in only practicing ethical SEO; they attempt to speed up the process of SEO by tricking the search engines. These antics are seriously not advised, the search engines are becoming wise to unethical SEO techniques they penalise such sites. This blog entry will go into further detail about both ethical and unethical SEO techniques.

Ethical SEO techniques are also referred to as white hat. Search engines love to see ethical SEO techniques like The UK SEO Agency, search engines want to give their searchers the best possible results. They aim to provide the most relevant websites to satisfy the search. Through ethical SEO websites are optimised to be the best for their visitors, the most content rich, highly relevant and user friendly. Consequently ethical SEO is the ideal for the search engines as it helps them give their searchers the best possible results.

Unethical SEO techniques also referred to as black hat, attempt to fast track a websites optimisation. Black hat techniques try to trick the search engines into believing a site is optimised. Methods include keyword spamming, hidden text, scraper sites and many more. Black hat SEO reduces the quality and relevance of a search engines results pages, hence search engines do not entertain black hat SEO techniques. Search engines have become wise to black hat, a site suspected of unethical SEO will be severely penalised in some cases banned from the search engines all together. No matter how large your company is if you practice unethical techniques search engines will not think twice about banning your corporate website from their rankings. Take BMW for example, in Feb 2006 Google banned their website due to an unethical SEO technique – Door way pages. The BMW website contained pages that were specifically designed for the Google bots to scan, Google bots were directed to these pages where as visitors were directed to another more human friendly page. As a result the search engines banned the BMW website for a period of time.

Below I have outlined several unethical black hat SEO techniques:

Keyword Spamming – This black hat technique involves spamming the content of a website with the keywords a site wishes to be found under. For example a fabric would have Felt Fabric as one of their keywords. In attempt to get the search engine spiders to pick up on these keywords and view the site as a relevant, the keyword Felt Fabric will be repeated frequently throughout the websites content. Although it is important not to over use the keyword, if the keyword is used too often it will weaken the relevance of the information. Keyword spamming is the name given to this process.

Hidden Text - Hidden text is the name given to the black hat SEO technique where by white text is written on a white background, hence hidden text. This text contains spamming of the keywords, it is intended only for the search engines to view as humans will not be able to see the text.

Scraper Sites – Scraper sites aim to get as much traffic to them as possible, they do this by stealing content from other websites throughout the World Wide Web. Taking another websites content creates duplicate content, search engines do not like duplicate content as it manipulates the relevance of their results pages.

The UK SEO Agency ONLY practice Ethical White Hat SEO techniques, we increase our clients search engine rankings through skill, hard work and dedication. Below I have highlighted several White Hat SEO techniques:

Relevant Content – It is essential to have fresh relevant content detailing what the company is about the products/services they provide. In particular the content should include the keywords the site is wishing to be found under. Although the keyword density should be correct, not too much or too little. The UK SEO Agency work to a particular keyword density, we know what works for our clients sites.

Link Building - When our clients come on board with The UK SEO Agency we ensure we generate a number of links from other relevant sites linking to our clients website. These links are from high page rank sites, that the search engines consider to be highly important. Relevant link building increases the flow of traffic to a website and increases the page rank of a site.

User Friendly – Ensuring your site is user friendly in terms of navigation and URL’s is an important white hat SEO technique. If a site is easy for a visitor to navigate through, the search engines should have no problem indexing the site.

To conclude The UK SEO Agency only practice ethical white hat SEO techniques, we work with the search engines to achieve optimum results for all our clients. If you would like to learn more about SEO, or perhaps receive a FREE website analysis for your corporate site please do not hesitate to contact us.