There are proper and improper techniques to improve search engine rankings for a website. These methods are usually grouped in three camps: white hat, black hat, or grey hat. White hat is approved optimization techniques, black hat is the unapproved, and since nothing in life is perfectly black or white, the grey hat techniques are the ones that are debatable. Flatiron SEO pride themselves on knowing the proper way to gain rankings on results pages.
Since there are no hard and fast rules to search engines, it is important to understand what they are looking for. Search engines are looking for easy to navigate sites, relevant content, relevant links, and honesty. All of these, and more, are considered white hat techniques. Honesty is not, ironically enough, to the content on the pages, but that the content that spiders find and the content a visitor sees are the same. White hat methods are similar to coding for accessibility, but are slightly different.
On the other hand, there are black hat techniques. Some webmasters use a technique to present different or more content to web crawlers, such as using text that is the same or similar color to the background or appears off screen, so that search engines find it, but a human visitor does not see it. Cloaking is a method that dishonest webmasters use where a different page appears if a human is visiting the site or a crawler is visiting.
Grey hat methods can be used either way. These methods may be employed, but are risky since some search engines accept them and some do not. One grey hat method is to purchase links, where the sole purpose is to have many links feeding into a site. It is much better to have organic, or unpaid for, links to your site, since search engines approve of these more.
By using a specialist, like Flatiron SEO, you are avoiding accidently following the wrong advice and employing a black hat method. Search engines that find sites with black hat methods on them will penalize the site. This can be either a lower ranking or banning from the search results completely. Companies that are banned from search engines lose much of their traffic, some up to 70%. Be very sure of the methods used to improve your search engine rankings.












