Most know what search engines optimization is... it
kind of says it on it's own. But, how it's perceived, can change from a webmaster to an other. For
example, most see off-site things as SEO work. I see it
like site promotion. If you exchange links and
stuff, yeah, of course you'd pick and optimize the
anchors and all... but I see SEO more as an onsite
practice, cause that you really control. Backlinks are
not under your control... at least, not the natural
ones, and this to me, is a separate thing.I see SEO
as being the art of making a page so the bots can access
it fully, and is well understood for the search engine
crawling it. The good use of the features available in
making the page, like <title>, <hx>... and how to
structure content of a site in order to have it crawled
properly and understood. The way this is done will determine if
black-hat, being the bad use, or white-hat, being the
good use of those techniques. Again, what black
or white techniques are is not perceived the same
by people.
For example, if I was taking a site for optimization,
I'd fix the tags, pages, navigation, anchors... on the
site itself, to optimize how it's presented to GoogleBot.
Lets say the site had 500 natural backlinks... would you
contact all of them to change the anchor they used for
the natural link they put to it. Beside balancing the
anchors, it would be something I'd get a desk person to
do. Of course this is MY way to describe what SEO
is... cause I don't optimize the web, I optimize a site
to improve it's presence on the internet, and in the
process get natural links and stuff. That's why I see
SEO as being an on-site work, the rest being promotion,
branding and marketing. So if you ask me, "Are you a
white or black hat SEO ?", I'll have to answer neither,
cause I optimize pages to present them well. I
don't try to spam them by pushing density and other
deoptimization techniques, because an optimized thing is
at it's optimal state, not over the line, not under it,
right on it. If the question was more, "After you did
SEO a site (made it onsite-optimum), do you apply white
or black techniques to promote it"... and now, I'd
answer I use white-hat techniques. But here again, what
is white for me is not what it is for you. Maybe link
exchange is cool for some, bad for others, and those who
think it's bad will call it black-hat. It often depends
on what you practice yourself. So I see SEO as a thing
that cannot be black or white, cause there is just one
optimized state, being lower or higher is unoptimized,
not white or black. It's a bit like saying "The moon is
an object that revolves around the sun"... true, cause
it does, but I think it would be more accurate as
"rotating around the earth". Both are valid, but one is
better, same for optimization. |
