Have you ever been uncertain if you should use a search engine optimization technique or not?

I recently looked back at some of the first sites I built and noticed an unsuprising trend. The sites I had built using strictly “white hat” SEO techniques were doing great. The sites I had built using greyer SEO techniques weren’t looking to good.

This was hardly a suprise. In an attempt to gain short term traffic & revenue I had traded off the long term success of the site. Does this mean we should stick strictly wiith “what hat” SEO techniques? Perhaps not.

The darker arts of SEO have their benefits, the most obvious being speed. Collected data can give you an accurate picture of the most rankable, and profitable, keywords.. Forget the manipulated Overture suggestion tool, your own stats tell the true picture.

For your next project you could create two parallel sites. Use one as a testing bed and data collector — the other treat as a baby, avoiding all questionable links and SEO techniques.

To be safe, avoid interlinking the two sites. To really, really be safe, use different domain whois info and host each site on a seperate account (with different c-class IP addresses.)

I am sure some of you are interested in which “grey/black hat” techniques you could use, here are some ideas. I don’t know how effective it still is, but one thing I have used is the Digitalpoint co-op ad network. Preferably you should not actually place the links on the domain you want to drive backlinks to. To quickly locate potential keywords you can use a fake content generator like RSSGM. Want more? Check out Quadzilla’s $100-a-month SEO Blackhat Forum.

Long term, using black and grey SEO strategies on your most prized sites is just dumb. High quality backlinks and viral link baiting are the new “blackhat.” And thats the way Google wants it.