Angels Versus Devils

I read yet another article today on the so called black hat versus white hat approach to SEO, and not surprisingly, the author comes out in favor of what we would consider to be white hat.  He says that this is like an angel and devil on our shoulder, with the angel telling us what is right to do, the white hat, and the devil preaching short term benefits.

Well as soon as I read that, I definitely found my topic for my latest blog here.  Angels may have a lot of things going for them, but I really doubt that business acumen is one of them.  The devil, on the other hand, may have us going too far and end up in the end preventing us from achieving our ultimate profit goals, but at least his heart is in the right place

The angel analogy is a perfect one though, as many people seem to think that black hat SEO is somehow unethical or wrong.  This is pure nonsense in fact and if you believe that, you’re definitely limiting yourself.

SEO stands for search engine optimization, and the key word in this phrase is optimization.  In our business, we are competing with other businesses to look to capture search engine traffic, and the only constraint that makes any sense at all is how well our strategies will work in accomplishing that.

Effective SEO Is Not Cheating

The part that doesn’t matter at all is what the search engines themselves recommend.  So this is not like going to school and being told how to behave, for instance, not to cheat on exams.

This is business, and looking to get a leg up by looking to institute best practices which will best serve our business goals is not only something that we do not want to avoid, it is something that is necessary to pursue if we want to be successful.

The online poker affiliate business is fiercely competitive, with hundreds and even thousands of sites competing for the few select search engine rankings that deliver any kind of meaningful traffic for a particular keyword search.  If we are even a little too conservative here, we have very likely failed right from the beginning.

The Proof Is Always In The Pudding

So the only person that is being cheated here is ourselves.  The whole idea behind SEO is to get results, and how successful we are at this is never a measure of how well our strategies correspond with search engine guidelines, or someone’s belief of how we should do things.

Instead, it is always a measure of how well we do in the search engine rankings.  So something that improves our standing here isn’t black or white hat, it’s green hat.  Green here means what best gets the job done, and makes us the most green.  Anything else doesn’t even deserve a hat designation at all, because we are afraid to wear one.

So the ultimate test of the appropriateness of a given SEO strategy is always a matter of how well it works in practice.  In fact, in order to ensure that we’re always making our businesses as competitive as possible, this requires us to look to come up with and test ideas which are at the cutting edge of SEO thinking, rather than look to avoid anything that might cause us to lose rankings.

The Bible Is Pretty Instructive Here

I remember reading a story in the Bible about three men who God gave some money to.   I have no idea what part of the Bible this is from as I’m far from a Bible scholar, but some of its stories really stood out for me, and this is one of them.

The first man buried it in the back yard for fear of upsetting God by losing it.  The second man also guarded it carefully and engaged in some very conservative transactions to preserve the principal, once again to look to ensure God’s favor.  The third man did not show fear and used it to accumulate a large amount of profit.

So the moral of the story was that God was very disappointed with the first two men due to their fear of losing, and took their money away from them.  The third man, who showed both courage and enterprise, was rewarded handsomely.  That’s the way it works in real life as well, by the way.

People Are Afraid Of Change

One of the reasons people cite as being behind their reluctance to be more aggressive with SEO is that they fear that things may change down the road and they may regret their so called blackness.

This fear is not entirely without merit, however this to a large degree is simply the nature of the beast, and while we can look to try to anticipate these changes, our motives must be driven by what will make us the most profit long term, and not be put off by excessive concern.

So in the opinion of our friend, the devil is alleged to offer us short term benefits, and presumably these benefits will likely be taken away at some point in the future.  Even if that were actually the case, and it may or may not be depending on how extreme the black hat strategies that are involved here, at least there are some benefits involved.

The angel will most likely have us doing things that really give us little or no chance to get any real benefits at all, either now or in the future.  Web promotion is nothing like just building something and by the grace of God it will succeed if we behave ourselves so to speak.

Instead, this strategy will have us getting sand kicked in our face just like the guy in the old Charles Atlas ads.  It is like the man who buried his money in the back yard.  He was too afraid to put it out there in fear of losing some or all of it.

If you don’t take risks, you simply won’t get anywhere near the kind of return that you are entitled to, and you may not get any returns at all.

So when it comes down to deciding what sort of hat you will be wearing in this game, keep in mind that the bottom line overall needs to determine that, not someone’s opinion.