Why Sustainable, White-hat Strategies Are So Important
Why Sustainable, White-hat Strategies Are So Important
You are building a business online, and chances are that you want to compete online for many years to come. If you want to do this, then you need to carefully choose the tactics you’re willing to employ and make an assessment of how risky those tactics are. As with any business (offline included), there are tactics that carry a certain amount of risk with them. For example, an offline business may carry out some kind of PR stunt to try and build awareness of the brand. The inherent risk is that a stunt can misfire, negatively affecting the brand and deterring potential customers.As a business, you need to weigh up the risks and benefits of any marketing activity. This is why white-hat strategies are so important to a website: They pose the least amount of risk and are very unlikely to lead to you being hit with a penalty from Google. Also, just as importantly, white-hat strategies focus on adding true value to the Internet, your industry, and your customers’ experience. If you want to build a loyal customer base which not only buys from you but happily recommends you to friends, you need to focus on tactics that give the customer a great user experience. Providing them with genuine, useful content is one way to do this.What works today may not work tomorrow, and where might that leave you? Many black-hats will replace their former ways with other shady techniques, and the cycle starts again. The problem is that this is not good for most businesses. Most businesses can’t afford to take risks with their websites, or constantly be looking over their shoulders, waiting for the day the search engines finally catch up with them.Why Sustainable, White-hat Strategies Are So ImportantIf you contrast this with white-hat techniques, you know that you’re building for the long term, and while some efforts will yield better results than others, you won’t need to be looking over your shoulder or worrying every time you hear there has been a Google update. You can read an excellent post by Rand on this topic along with lots of examples of white-hat tactics working very well.