Much has been made about blackhat SEO principles and, in general, greyhat SEO principles and techniques largely go unmentioned.The differences between black and white are obvious, but shades of grey begin to overlap and the line becomes blurred as to what is acceptable and what is not.

Ultimately you must rely on sound judgment and core design principles to protect you from possible damage should you cross over that thin line.

You would think that grey area would be sufficient enough that there wouldn’t be much trouble. But the issue is really one of human nature. If you examine the spectrum of gray – it varies from very near white to very near black. Because people are looking to get the most out of their SEO efforts (which can be very time consuming and costly) they are generally only operating in a small fraction of that grey spectrum – and it is in the dark grey to nearly black region that most operate in. It all comes down to risk and reward.

By intelligent design and understanding of SEO principles, SEO experts can design a site architecture which can allow for experimentation at different levels with different degrees of risk and still isolate those activities from impacting your money site. This is where an SEO expert is worth their weight in gold. You want to be able to walk that thin tightrope, but you also want to have a safety net below you so that if you fall, you don’t take down your core business site with you. This strategy is normally divided into “feeder” sites and “money” sites and involves the creation of many different easily created “feeder” sites for which more experimentation into greyhat traffic and SEO techniques may be explored.

As an example, let’s assume you have your primary business site (your money site) and you want to experiment with driving traffic via a greyhat approach. Rather than doing this experimentation on your money site, you would create one or more “feeder” sites. A feeder site can be very simplistic, such as a single page Squidoo lens or Hubpage. Frequently social media sites are used as feeder sites because of their ease of creation and because they get a lot of SEO juice (in other words, Google and the other search engines love them). Let’s assume that your business site is a PR3 site (Page Rank 3). You can increase its authority by linking from higher page rank sites back to yours and most of these social media sites are very high (PR6 and above) ranking sites. So if you were to create a few different Squidoo lens or Hubpages pointing page to your site and “feeding” traffic to it, not only would you increase traffic but also authority, relevance and page rank. It is important to note than the design of this architecture is crucial and you shouldn’t take this brief example as a blueprint, because it leaves out many vital details that you need to discuss with a credible SEO expert.

A key concept to understand when designed for greyhat experimentation is that Google does not penalize you for a blackhat site linking to your site. It does, however, penalize you big time if you link to a blacklisted site as it sees that as a credibility issue on your part. We can’t control who links to us, and therefore, Google can’t penalize us for that. So, greyhat experimentation would allow you to try out some different experiments on some of your feeder sites knowing that the worst case scenario would simply involve loosing that site and/or account. Keep in mind, many vital small details must be adhered to in order to insure the protection of your money site. Things that you wouldn’t normally think of, such as making sure your identity is not linked to all of these feeder sites or it will be easy for Google to tie them all together. Remember that greyhat techniques ten to me much closer to blackhat techniques than whitehat techniques, so you still need to treat them with the greatest of respect and caution. You simply cannot afford to jeopardize your money site under any circumstances.

Another example of a greyhat solution would be article or content “spinning”. Article spinning involves the automated generation of multiple unique versions of an article. So, you write it once, run it through a program and spit out dozens or hundreds of unique versions. This is done because the search engines give high preference to unique content. Article spinning can either be completely whitehat, greyhat or completely blackhat depending on how you do it. A blackhat version involves completely automated efforts that generally produce very poor results, but do it with minimal effort. Whitehat article spinning, would essentially me just writing dozens of unique articles – 100% safe, but very time consuming. Enter the greyhat approach. Greyhat article spinning software is pretty intelligent. It requires more time than a purely automated approach, but far less time than a complete article rewrite approach. So, for example, a greyhat article spinner may require you to provide two variations of every sentence in your article (thus twice as much work) but from those variations it may spin that article into dozens of unique combinations of content all of which will be very human legible and articulate since every word of it was written manually. Blackhat techniques often use synonym and thesaurus look up tables and automated text and phrase substitutions, etc… all of which generally lead to poor results.

Hopefully by now, you’ve seen the benefits and risks involved with greyhat SEO principles as well and can recognize the essential role that an SEO expert will play in hand crafting and designing an SEO friendly architecture for your site or network of sites.

Grey Hat (or Gray Hat): Since the color gray is between black and white,logically Grey Hat SEO sounds like a label for the middle ground.

But it’s not.Because White is pure white and grey is a shade of black, we have confusion.

Some say Grey Hat is NOT White Hat and is just a shade of Black Hat.

So let’s step away from the coor wheel and define Grey Hat as the practice of tactics/techniques which remain ill-defined by all that published material coming out of Google, and for which reasonable people (not White Hat SEOs, mind you, but “reasonable people”) could disagree on how the tactics support or contrast with the “spirit” of Google’s published guidelines.

White Hat SEO techniques are those techniques used to build and promote a website which are above board, honest and right, play within the rules and try to follow all the search engine guidelines.

Google ranks pages on a scale of 0-10 with 10 being the highest.

So its not just about the amount of links it’s also about the importance of those links – you could get hundreds of links on zero or low ranked pages, which have content that has no relation to your keywords, this may help your website crawl up search engine result pages for some keywords, but you could achieve a much better result with just a handful of high quality links on websites which are related to yours.

Website Promotion – The First Step:

You don’t need to submit your website to any of the main search engines or the bulk of the other search engines.. Because it’s just a waste of time, if your website has a handful of incoming links from other websites then any search engine will naturally index your site after finding it from these links. However you can get indexed in search engines within 24 hours! Yes that’s correct.
1 Link on any page ranked 5 or more – spidered and indexed within 24 hours.
2 links on any page ranked 4 or more – 48 hours.
4 Links on any page ranked 3 or more – 96 hours.

White Hat SEO Techniques:

Using White Hat SEO techniques to get ranked in SERPS involves :
1) Building a website with unique content and images.
2) Trading links fairly.
3) Getting your website listed in directories or on other websites with related content.

Let us see the techniques in detail.

1) Building a website with unique content and images.
Unique content is content found only on one website, the bigger your website is (the more unique content you have), then the higher it will rank in SERPS and the more traffic you will get because you have many text keywords which can match search engine queries. You will also naturally have many internal hyperlinking keywords.

2) Trading links fairly.
This means making your link exchange with other websites that have the same or a similar theme to yours. It also involves regularly checking the links to ensure both parties are adhering to the deal and that the site you are trading with is not cheating on reciprocal links.
Cheating on reciprocal links can mean making a lowly link exchange into a lucrative one-way link. There are a number of ways Black Hat webmasters use to do this. White Hat webmasters should also be aware of these techniques as they are more than likely being used against them.

3) Getting your website listed in directories or on other websites with related content.
Getting other websites to link to you, without you reciprocating the link is much more important. You can submit your link to your signature in forums, directories which don’t cheat you, your friends’ websites, Obviously if you have stuff which is free, or funny or entertaining, or your website is very useful or informative then other surfers may link to your site.

Using white hat SEO does not involve buying links of any form. Buying links is now considered by Google as a violation of their guidelines and an attempt to manipulate SERPS. So basically this means that if you buy any links at all which are HTML links direct to your website then you are in violation of Googles guidelines.

Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as: Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the tag..

Paying to get a website listed in the search engines does not guarantee that Internet users will find your site

. Although the money can get you listed quicker, it has nothing to do with how well you rank. If you pay money and get listed on Page 20 of the search engine results pages, you may as well not be listed. Most Internet users don’t browse past the first 10 search result pages. By using the right strategy, you can soar to the top of the search engine pages. Best of all, you can do it for free.

Instructions

1.Identify the site-related keywords and keyword phrases Internet users are typing into search engines. The goal is to find the keywords and phrases that are related to your website. Look for keywords and phrases that get the most searches.

The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is a free online resource that will allow you to search keyword statistics (see Resources).

2.Purchase a domain name that includes your targeted keyword or phrase. The domain name is one of the first things search engine spiders look at when crawling the web for relevant websites.

3.Write high-quality content for your website. Include keywords and keyword phrases throughout the content. Ideally, you should include your keyword within the first sentence of your article.

Sprinkle the keywords throughout the remainder of the article. However, you don’t want to use the keywords so much that your writing sounds redundant to your readers.

4.Create meta tags for your web pages. The meta tags should include your web page title, keywords and description. If you need assistance creating and using meta tags, use free online meta tag generator tools (see Resources).

5.Generate inbound links to your website. This is done by placing your website address on other websites. For instance, place your website address on message boards, forums and related directories.

Ask the owner of another website if he is willing to exchange links. In other words, you place a link to his site on your web page and he places a link to your site on his page.

6. Avoid using “black hat SEO” tactics. An example of black hat SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, is when the site creator places a lot of keyword phrases on a web page and makes the words invisible. The words are made invisible by using the same font color and background color.

Black hat SEO may get you top rankings for a short time. However, if you get caught, your site may be completely banned from the search engine results pages. So, it’s best to do it the right way.

7. Submit your URL to search engines. To do this, visit each search engine page. Click the option to “Add URL,” “Add Website” or “Submit URL.” Depending on the search engine, the wording may vary slightly.

Paying to get a website listed in the search engines does not guarantee that Internet users will find your site

. Although the money can get you listed quicker, it has nothing to do with how well you rank. If you pay money and get listed on Page 20 of the search engine results pages, you may as well not be listed. Most Internet users don’t browse past the first 10 search result pages. By using the right strategy, you can soar to the top of the search engine pages. Best of all, you can do it for free.

Instructions

1.Identify the site-related keywords and keyword phrases Internet users are typing into search engines. The goal is to find the keywords and phrases that are related to your website. Look for keywords and phrases that get the most searches.

The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is a free online resource that will allow you to search keyword statistics (see Resources).

2.Purchase a domain name that includes your targeted keyword or phrase. The domain name is one of the first things search engine spiders look at when crawling the web for relevant websites.

3.Write high-quality content for your website. Include keywords and keyword phrases throughout the content. Ideally, you should include your keyword within the first sentence of your article.

Sprinkle the keywords throughout the remainder of the article. However, you don’t want to use the keywords so much that your writing sounds redundant to your readers.

4.Create meta tags for your web pages. The meta tags should include your web page title, keywords and description. If you need assistance creating and using meta tags, use free online meta tag generator tools (see Resources).

5.Generate inbound links to your website. This is done by placing your website address on other websites. For instance, place your website address on message boards, forums and related directories.

Ask the owner of another website if he is willing to exchange links. In other words, you place a link to his site on your web page and he places a link to your site on his page.

6. Avoid using “black hat SEO” tactics. An example of black hat SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, is when the site creator places a lot of keyword phrases on a web page and makes the words invisible. The words are made invisible by using the same font color and background color.

Black hat SEO may get you top rankings for a short time. However, if you get caught, your site may be completely banned from the search engine results pages. So, it’s best to do it the right way.

7. Submit your URL to search engines. To do this, visit each search engine page. Click the option to “Add URL,” “Add Website” or “Submit URL.” Depending on the search engine, the wording may vary slightly.