We all know you can engage in ‘black hat’ SEO (doing naughty things like hiding text and farming links) and ‘white hat’ SEO (or ‘natural SEO’ – doing sensible things like growing links organically and producing great, keyword-rich content). Now the SEO world is crying out for some trendy new styles of headgear. What does your choice of alternative hat colour say about your approach to SEO?

Yellow Hat

Yellow hats have a sunny and open disposition when it comes to online marketing. You’re keen to try out new strategies like Twitter feeds and viral videos, because your optimistic outlook makes you think they might succeed – and often they do. But your happy-go-lucky, yellow-hatted approach means you can sometimes cause you to overlook potential problems, like going over budget.

Blue Hat

As a blue hat you’re an SEO pessimist – you don’t think social media has anything to offer and you don’t want to waste your precious resources finding out. When something doesn’t work for you, like keyword optimised press releases, your blue hat means you feel so dejected that you stop trying without a fight. While your cautious approach can save you time and money, it can also mean that you miss out on potentially lucrative opportunities. Try being more open-minded and giving new strategies a bit more of a chance – a few tweaks could bring drastically improved results.

Red Hat

A red hat means you have an aggressive approach to SEO. Your fiery temperament drives you to constantly push out content and jam keywords and anchor text links all over the place, almost bullying your site into ranking for your chosen terms. While this approach can bring impressive results, try not to go overboard – remember, your users will want content which makes sense to them and keyword-stuffing can ruin the user experience – and reduce your conversion rate as a result. Plus, search engines value a few good links over masses of irrelevant ones.

Green Hat

As a green-hatted SEO, you aim to do your bit for the online environment. You provide excellent content and useful tools on your site, so you gain links naturally from a variety of sources who all want to reference you for their readers’ benefit.

Genuine concern for your customers means you constantly update your content with the latest news and information about your products and services, leading to a positive user experience. This regular activity across your pages also persuades search engines that your site is keeping up to date, and they reward you for it.

You look out for customer queries about your brand or product on social sites and answer them openly and honestly, giving users a warm, fuzzy customer service glow and encouraging repeat business.

And, as a friendly green hat, you’re pleased to link out to relevant sites, showing search engines you have a natural approach to linking. Your outbound links also show other companies you are a good cyber-citizen and not a covetous link monster, so they feel better about doing business with you.

Green hats, by the way, are the hottest SEO hat look for 2010.

Author Bio: Corinne writes for atom42, an online marketing agency in London. atom42 employs a range of marketing fields to create an integrated online marketing strategy for each of its clients

Category: Marketing
Keywords: online marketing agency,onlinemarketing,seo,seo advice