Yesterday, I was out with a friend (slash business contact) for a possible SEO project consultancy with one of his clients. On the way home, we talked about SEO stuff, which, surprisingly, is still a foreign language to him considering he has been a blogger, and a web developer for quite a number of years already. From on-page optimization, to linkbuilding, to SEO Philippines, to Black Hat SEO, to my personal linkbuilding tactics, etc, we had a fun time discussing and learning from each other.

At one point, we discussed about the differences between Black Hat, White Hat, and Grey Hat techniques.

  • Black Hat SEO — methods to try to improve rankings that are disapproved of by the search engines and/or involve deception. This includes keyword stuffing, hidden keywords, comment spamming, etc.
  • White Hat SEO — conforms to the search engines’ guidelines and/or involves no deception. This include publishing unique and fresh content, and getting legitimate links, etc.
  • Grey Hat SEO — falls somewhere in between. Sometimes there’s a thin line between what’s legal and not. As they say, in SEO, there’s always a grey area too. :P

But you know what’s really working for me right now (and the past months)?

  • Pink Hat SEO — linkbuilding achieved through distributing pink and girly wordpress themes; and being all pa-cute and charming, posting pa-cute pictures of yourself, and uploading pa-cute podcasts to get more traffic, and doing personal favors in exchange for backlinks. And then, there’s twittering pseudo-emo posts that aim to spark fellow twitterers’ curiousity, making them visit your site just in case you posted a more elaborate story about what you posted in twitter just about five minutes ago. (Face it — women have the potential to RULE the SEO Industry. Bwahaha.)

With Pink Hat SEO, before you know it, you have a network of lurkers who would either talk about you behind your back, or visit your site out of sheer curiosity. Whatever the case, you get traffic anyway. :P