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The Internet is really a miraculous thing. It puts the entirety of human history and knowledge in your hands in a matter of milliseconds. Every two days we create as much content as we did from the dawn of civilization to 2003.

Want to know why flamingos are pink? How to tie the perfect Windsor knot? Tax codes for Colorado? You can find all the answers you need with just a few quick queries in your search engine of choice.

But, because the Internet is the great equalizer – anyone can become a publisher and say whatever they want – this also means the Internet serves up both great knowledge and information as well as useless fluff, generic websites and pointless content. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, SEO can help the good, the bad and the ugly parts of the Internet do really well in the search engines.

What kind of content is your SEO helping? Are you making the Web a better place with your SEO or are you polluting it?

White Hat SEO Actually Helps the Search Engines Deliver a Better Product

No matter how you feel about Google and Bing, they are in the business of helping their customers, just like you are. They are not in business to help companies make a profit. You might sell pet supplies or enterprise resource planning software – the search engines “sell” information. If your website happens to contain the information search engine customers are looking for, you’ll be rewarded with a higher spot in the SERPs, which means more traffic to your site and, hopefully, more customers for you. White hat SEO helps ensure everyone in that scenario wins. The search engines get to present their visitors with the most relevant information, the searcher finds what they are looking for and you get a new customer.

By optimizing your website in accordance with best practice guidelines, you are actually helping the search engines deliver a better product to their users, which means you get better traffic coming to your website. The goal of your SEO campaign should not simply be to get more visitors; it should be to get more targeted visitors. Targeted visitors are much more likely to convert. You want to create and optimize content that hones in on this target audience so your website shows up for the right kind of search queries.

Black Hat SEO Artificially Inflates the Value and Relevancy of Your Website

I guarantee just about everyone has sat down and typed a query into Google or Bing and come up with search results that were junk. Nothing in the SERPs was relevant, the sites were poor quality and the content was ho-hum at best. How frustrating is that as a user? Yet, day in and day out, I see plenty of site owners using black hat SEO tactics to artificially boost the value and relevancy of their website to get to the top of the SERPs, creating those useless search results. If you hate it when you’re the searcher, why are you contributing to the problem as the site owner?

Not every site that uses black hat SEO tactics to get to the top of the SERPs is a spam blog or other low-quality site, but those tend to be the ones that take advantage of black hat SEO because it’s cheaper, quicker and easier to do than white hat SEO. Unfortunately, for the sites that do stick to white hat SEO, those spammy sites will rank better, at least in the short-term. They clutter up the search results and push more deserving sites farther down the SERPs. But those are the sites that most of the Google algorithm updates go after – the ones that steal content, build low-quality but high-volume link profiles, overuse exact match anchor text and other web spam tactics. The algorithm isn’t perfect, and sometimes sites slip through the filters and still do well despite Google’s best efforts, so site owners continue to invest in these tactics hoping they’ll be one of the lucky ones to survive the updates. Are you becoming one of the site owners who is chasing the algorithm and polluting search results?

What are You Really Trying to do with Your SEO?

As a small business owner, I take a lot of pride in the brand that I have built up for my company over the years. Of course I want and need to make money, but I’m not looking for a get-rich-quick scheme, which is how many people still view SEO. White hat SEO, the kind that I believe produces the best and longest lasting results, is not a quick thing. It takes months to get the ball rolling in the right direction and years of continued work to keep the momentum moving, even as it builds upon itself overtime.

I have seen firsthand how well a good SEO campaign works, not only for my own business but for my full service SEO clients as well. It doesn’t happen quickly but it does happen.

The sites that commit to publishing great content time and time again; the sites that invest in building quality links and not worrying about quantity; the sites that understand there is no “secret” to SEO success – these businesses make the search results relevant to their customers. Sites that are looking to make a quick buck and run on autopilot or “game the system” are usually the cause of crummy search results.

Which kind of site and SEO program are you investing in?

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Nick Stamoulis is the President of Brick Marketing, a Boston based SEO services and content marketing agency. With nearly 13 years of industry experience, Nick Stamoulis shares his knowledge by publishing the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter, read by more than 150,000 opt-in subscribers, and writing for the Brick Marketing Blog. Contact Nick Stamoulis at 781-999-1222 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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