If one thing differentiates online businesses from "traditional" ones, it is the way in which they market. While for traditional businesses everything comes down to where they are located, if an online business doesn’t bring in any traffic, it will not matter how well built its webpage is or how much quality its content is either.

This is why for every online business out there, few things are as important as obtaining a sustained amount of traffic to their website. And when it comes to choosing the best method to obtain reliable, organic and long-lasting results on search engines, there is no way to better do it than with the help of SEO experts that really understand the true complexities of it.

The reason why this is so important is that some online marketing companies offer what they call a complete and efficient SEO service, when in fact what they offer is something known as Black Hat SEO, which is just a quick traffic scheme that can be harmful for any company that implements it.

Black Hat and White Hat SEO

Here are the main differences between this SEO technique and White Hat SEO, the broadly accepted (and practiced) SEO technique among truly successful online businesses.

White Hat SEO

When applying White Hat SEO, companies employ the best practice methods to obtain high search engine rankings. These methods fully comply with the accepted search engine guidelines as well as providing results that will last for the long term.

Furthermore, this approach to SEO requires deep analysis of the business’ website, as well as thorough knowledge of the rules of SEO in order not to break them accidentally.

Black Hat SEO

The main characteristic of Black Hat SEO is that the ones who provide this method tend to promise almost immediate results to their clients. However, the methods do not follow search engine guidelines and thus, do not last in the long term. What makes things worse is that the abuse of these methods can get a website banned from search engines, which is the same as facing complete bankruptcy.

Now, in order to avoid falling victim of a Black Hat SEO company, online businesses need to consider some aspects that usually gives these Black Hat companies away:

• They always offer a #1 search engine ranking in a very short span of time.

• They tend to contact companies without previous request, which shows lack of professionalism.

• Most fraudulent SEO companies out there will crumble upon the smallest research. If an SEO company is effective and sought-after, both individuals and other companies will be talking/writing about them all over the Internet.

• One of the most noticeable tactics Black Hat SEO employs is the inclusion of small snippets of invisible text (same colour as the background for example) on the clients’ websites, which tries to give search engines the impression of spidering a highly keyword dense website.

Conclusion

Now that your business knows how risky to request the service of Black Hat SEO companies is, most users will not have trouble differentiating these companies from honest ones from the very beginning. And by doing so, they will save substantial amounts of time and money.