White Black SEO - What's White Hat SEO

Search engines act like law enforcers, you have a lot of do’s and don’t. You have 2 ways of optimizing your website, White or Black Hat SEO. White Hat is the way to go to be indexed and high ranked in search engines.

White Hat SEO

The White Hat SEO is the correct way of optimizing your website. All you need to do is follow the search engine’s guidelines. There are huge lists of guidelines but I will be giving you the most important ones. Visit Google’s webmaster tools section for a complete list of all the guidelines.

So the most important white hat techniques are:

1. Have quality content on your webpages.

2. Make sure your text is in a structural markup.

3. Provide good meta information.

4. Use good and effective keywords.

5. Build yourself some quality inbound links.

Quality Content:

Quality content is what search engines aim for. They will look for the perfect match in content to any given search query. So it is obvious that your content should be top notch and be the most relevant possible to whatever it is you sell, promote, buy, etc. Make sure to offer unique well written content.

For example, let’s say you sell cars and you have a website with 1 page giving your company’s information and a little text explaining what services you offer. Now you have a competitor also selling cars but his website contains 10 pages explaining what services he offers, why choose him over others, which cars he repairs, and so on. It is obvious in this example that the website with 10 pages will be indexed with a bigger weight than the other one, Of course many other factors affect it, but always important to have the most relevant content about your services on your website.

Structural Markup:

White Hat SEO - The Right Way

For those who don’t know what structural markup is, it’s the simple fact that a search engine will give bigger weight to a <h1> tag than a <h2> tag and so on. So you might want to make sure that your keywords are in that <h1> tag. Try using the <h1> tag only once per page because the search engine see’s that tag as the most important.

Using CSS to separate design elements from the content is great because it makes it easier for a search engine to find and read the content. Just always keep in mind, content in KING.

Title and Meta Tags:

Alright now this is where a lot of people get confused so listen up closely, there is no point at all of spamming your meta keyword tag because it has absolutely no influence on your ranking, it just tells the search engines which keywords you have in your web page.

Now you might ask why should we put them at all. Well you lose nothing putting them and you want to put all the chances on your side. The keyword tag was so misapplied in the past that the search engines decided to give it no weight on your rankings.

The meta description tag on the other hand is more important, even though search engines don’t use it as ranking, it is what people will read first when you show up in the results. So this part should be taken more seriously because having a good solid description is key and will attract traffic to your website.

Last but not least, the title tag which is the most important out of all 3 tags. This tag has a great amount of weight on your ranking. Using good keywords that are relevant to your content is key. But remind yourself to always remain spam free, give short and precise keywords.

If you have a company name and would like to put it in the title, always put it at the end. Remember that search engines give bigger weight to the first keywords.

Keywords:

Before starting to optimize keywords, I would suggest looking which keywords are being used the most in your industry or business. You can do that using the  Google Adwords Tools. This will tell you approximately how many times a month that given keyword was typed in as a search query.

Once that is done, concentrate on the keywords in your content. I  recommend using multi word keywords instead of single words. It is easier to be found that way because most searchers type in short phrases as queries. Try emphasizing your keywords by giving them the <strong></strong> tags, this will give them more importance. Also use the keywords that you have used in the title tag, meta keywords tag, and meta description.



I recommend putting a <h1> tag for your most important keyword. This will give that keyword a lot of weight in the search engines eyes. For a second keyword that is less important give it a <h2> tag and so on. Obviously having a rich text is important. As you probably already know search engines can’t see images so make sure to give them a title and an alt tag.

Inbound Links:



White Hat SEO vs Black Hat SEO



Links are the key to having high ranking in search results. Consider a link as a vote, so the more you have the better it is. But here again do not spam your website with links because search engines will know that you are spamming. Try being as natural as possible.

It is common sense that links from a certain website or blog has more weight than another. For example if a well known blog with established traffic offers you a link, that link is worth a lot more than 100 links from smaller websites. Make sure to get links that are relevant to your content and keywords.

You don’t want to get a link from a music blog if you’re in the automobile business. Although that link is still good, you want to stay the most relevant to your keywords as possible.