Pay for Performance SEO: White Hat vs. Black Hat Marketing

With Pay for Performance SEO, businesses only pay for results. However, it’s vital that you know how the SEO firm you hire is getting those results. In search engine marketing, there are two main types of techniques used, white hat and black hat.

White hat methods are those that essentially provide the visitor and search engines with legitimate information for organic search engine optimization. These include article marketing, blogging, etc. Essentially, your keywords are used naturally in content that is spread across the internet, with relevant links back to your website or blog. This is acceptable by all search engines and isn’t cheating, it also helps establish your company as a useful source of information and draws clients in.

Black hat marketing, on the other hand, is cheating the system and using methods that trick the search engines into thinking that your site is valuable enough to be ranked in the top 10 results. These include invisible text and keyword stuffing, or other techniques that are not permitted and can get you in trouble. While these techniques usually do see short term results, they rarely last long, since the search engines are constantly changing their algorithms to avoid spammers and cheaters. Some Pay for Performance companies use these low techniques to get you results so you will pay them and then they leave you to take the fall.

For long term, stable results, look for companies that offers white hat SEO techniques. They should be able to tell you how they are going to get search engine results for you and these should be acceptable tactics, such as article marketing and  on-page optimization. Pay for Performance is a great way to go if you are on a tight budget and can’t afford to throw away your advertising dollars, but you should also have a good idea of just how those results are being achieved.