Recently, a master’s candidate asked if I could provide examples as to why black hat tactics may be beneficial to SEO methods in the short term, but may ultimately negatively affect a site in the long-term. Given some experiences over the past year, my first response was to smirk. Yes, smirk. You see, it used to be difficult to “sell” clients on the idea that white hat tactics were the best way to go when implementing SEO methods and recommendations. However, after several events that occurred in 2011, things have changed. For instance, dare I mention jcpenney? Or PANDA?

Although black hat tactics may garner great results initially, utilizing these methods is similar to not paying your taxes and hoping the IRS won’t catch you. Of course, the argument can be made that not many sites get penalized for using black hat SEO methods. But do you really want to chance it? I don’t know of any site that can afford penalization for violating search engine guidelines, especially on the monster known as Google!

Additionally, on that same note, your black hat SEO methods could be in danger of being “outed” by credible, well-known sites and news sources, such as the New York Times, for not following search engine guidelines to uphold quality. The New York Times wrote a piece exposing jcpenney’s link building black hat tactics after discovering that thousands of low-quality links pointed to their website, jcpenney.com. Soon after, similar articles began popping up – just do a search for the keyphrases “overstock” and “paid links” for evidence.

Now, you may think you are in the clear if you have conducted black hat tactics and have not yet been “caught.” However, your competitors, who may be jealous of your rankings, could potentially examine your site to determine which SEO methods you used to achieve these results. There are free and paid tools available to determine which tactic is used – on or off of a site. If your competitors used these tools on your site, and found that you are in violation of search engine guidelines, they could potentially report you to those credible news sources, like the New York Times.

Our SEM firm, Medium Blue, has told our clients for years to avoid having duplicate content on websites. No matter how much time it takes or how much money it costs to write content, website copy should be uniquely-written (and hopefully, optimized) content that is unique from page-to-page on your site as well as from other sites. Our white hat SEO methods used to get so much pushback from clients and other SEO companies regarding our approach to copy; however, we continued to promote this recommendation because a website containing duplicate content is similar to paying for links – both black hat tactics are against many search engines’ guidelines.

Thankfully, “sticking to our guns” and continuing to promote SEO methods that utilized only unique content ended up paying off.  Earlier this year it hit. Google rolled out PANDA 1.0 in February 2011, which penalized sites for having duplicate content. Since the original PANDA algorithm, several more versions were rolled out to continue to “clean up” Google from sites that used black hat tactics, such as duplicate content.

The bottom line is, search engine guidelines have been around for a long time and are easily available on each respective search engines’ site. If you want to gamble your site’s success and engage in black hat tactics in order to receive a boost in rankings, your site may ultimately suffer in the long run. I doubt link building schemes and duplicate content penalizations are the end of Google’s (and other search engine’s) attempts to “clean up” the web. Do you really want to jeopardize the future of your site? Is it really worth it? No — especially when you can achieve the same results with white hat SEO methods!

On the flip side, if you are in the market for an SEO firm and/or are implementing internet marketing recommendations to your site, be sure to ask questions, such as “Are these recommendations aligned with the search engine guidelines?” If not, you may want to reevaluate the recommendations… or even your SEO firm.

Yes, it is true, there are a lot of fun and useful SEO tools out there – many of which are free. However, be careful! Just because there are tools that say they can assist you with optimization efforts, doesn’t mean that they will with 100% accuracy.

1.  With Most Free Tools, You Get What You Pay For. Although I am a huge fan of SEO tools and free stuff, I make sure to double-check data that a free SEO tool (or any tool for that matter) gives me. For example, a client of mine had a favorite keyphrase that he desperately wanted to be ranked #1 for in Google. Therefore, I regularly checked his company’s rankings for this keyphrase so that I could let them know when our team achieved this goal. On day it happened – my SEO tool told me that they were #1! I was so excited! But fortunately, I knew better than to report the results without checking.

Before I picked up the phone to call them about the good news, I searched for the term in Google and, low and behold, they were not #1 – the tool was inaccurate. However, the good thing about this is that although the SEO tool was inaccurate, it did help me find out that the client had jumped more than 10 positions for that particular keyphrase and was now on the first page of Google. That was worth calling the client about!

2.  Use SEO tools as Guidance Because the Raw Numbers are Not Always 100% Accurate. Piggybacking off of that last point, the best way to use some SEO tools is to review trends and monitor major changes. Although a tool may state that you are ranked #1 on Google for a keyphrase (while in reality you are not), you should pay attention to trends and percentages. The numbers that SEO tools give you may not be totally accurate, but the overall info they provide may be more useful information than their ‘raw data’. Plus, the tools aren’t usually too off-point. Like the example above about the client’s keyphrase being #1 – even though the client wasn’t #1, their keyphrase did jump significantly and that was definitely worth noting!

3.  These Tools Can be Dangerous if You Don’t Know How to Use Them! It is funny how many people think they are SEO experts after reading a book, reading a few articles about the industry, or even getting their site a one-time free analysis from a person trying to sell them SEO. The same applies to when someone gets hold of a SEO tool and doesn’t know how to use it properly. You should be sure to read up on where the data is pulled from and what the info is really telling you, instead of just assuming that everything is working to your benefit! There is a lot of helpful information out there, but be careful! Knowing enough to be dangerous can be very dangerous if you apply your ‘SEO knowledge’ to your site improperly. I’ve seen it happen time and time again! I’ve gained several clients who applied what very little they know about SEO to their site and eventually have to hire our team to not only go back and fix what damage has been done, but to re-optimize the whole site. The SEO tools are there for you to use, but make sure you know how to use them and can verify the data they provide to help you!

Even with their faults, I’ll continue to use SEO tools – free or paid (especially downloadable ones on Firefox)! If used properly, they tell me a lot – it’s just important to know how to read the data and know that it’s not 100% accurate. And, it’s a lot better than conducting the same research manually!

We’ve all heard it time and time again – the internet marketing industry is ever-changing and it is imperative for every search engine optimization company to stay on top of the trends. Well, it’s also important to take it a step further and make sure that clients are updated on these trends when it will affect their campaigns.

Our client services team has several ways of sharing current trends, tips and information with our clients. Beyond creating specific recommendations and strategies on an ongoing basis, we also send our internet marketing clients our exclusive Client Connection newsletter. This newsletter covers several topics as they pertain to our clients and their campaigns. We include the latest industry news as well as information about our search engine optimization company as it is important that our clients know what is going on within the business.  In addition, if more than one client asks a particular question in any given month, that question and an answer are included in a FAQ section in the Client Connection newsletter as others will most likely want to know the answer as well.

We also offer Out of the Blue, a monthly newsletter subscription for which anyone can sign up – not just clients of our search engine optimization company! We include information similar to the Client Connection, such as industry trends, internet marketing news, etc. It’s a great informational tool – and one you don’t have search to find because the newsletter shows up in your inbox on a monthly basis!