White Hat Seo What It Is and Why You Should Use It instead of Black Hat SEO Tactics
There is so much talk online about SEO and knowing how to apply acceptable White hat SEO methods.
When choosing an SEO tactic to improve your search engine rankings always bet on white hat SEO!
Photo credit: Geert from morguefile.com
Another question many people ask is what is the difference between white hat SEO and Black Hat SEO?
Just about every website out there is trying to find ways to improve their websites search engine rankings, by using a number of SEO methods, whether white hat SEO or Black hat SEO.
I have mentioned on a number of occasions the importance of achieving top rankings in the search engines, and this can be achieved over time, even with quite competitive keyword terms….
Though, one lesson we soon learn is that if we are not using legit White Hat SEO methods to gain those great search engine rankings, we will probably end up in all sorts of trouble.
Firstly, let’s look at what is considered to be White Hat SEO methods.
White Hat SEO is really basic SEO, when you really look at it. You are probably using most of the White Hat SEO methods now, and may not realize it!
Here’s what White Hat SEO is.
White Hat SEO is when you are optimizing your website and your website content for Human visitors not search engines.
This does not mean you are not trying to rank in the search engines when using white hat SEO, it means that your purpose behind wishing to achieve better search engine rankings, is to gain a wider human audience….
Here are some basic White Hat SEO Methods.
(1). Writing quality (Audience driven) content(Yes, quality content is still king)…
I know we have all heard that “Content is king” thing a billion times, though, it seemed to be just as important as ever…
(2). Using Social Sites like Twitter, FaceBook, Google +, etc adds the human dimension to your Website.
Currently their is far more weight being placed on social interaction as a ranking factor, and to show your sites popularity….so we should consider at the very least getting engaged on one or more of the social sites…
(3). Keywords and Keyword Research. (We all love keywords, right)?
Yes, Keyword research is considered a great part of a white Hat SEO campaign. The reason being is that, your aiming to rank that “quality content” of yours up on top of the search engine results to gain a wider (human) audience.
(4). Back links and link building (Natural).
Did you notice that I wrote (Natural) link building? Some of the most natural back link building methods is by leaving quality comments on other websites). You can also gain natural links by joining forums related to your niche(topic) and by doing guest posts on other websites….
Authors note: It’s best to do your blog commenting, forum posting or commenting or guest posting on websites that are in the same topic(niche) as your own site…..so if your website is about cooking, getting links from other High profile cooking sites, would be very helpful for your site….
(5). Internal Linking (to your inner pages).
This is one of the most important things you can do as part of your White Hat SEO campaign. Not linking back to your older posts(or not doing it properly) can make it hard for search engines and visitors to access your site…
If search engines cannot properly access(crawl)your sites inner pages, you will have trouble improving your rankings for those pages. If people cannot access those older posts, you will lose visitors and page views and your sites bounce rate will also go up(which is not good)….
(6). Promoting your Website Content
So having put so much work into your white hat SEO campaign to help your website content achieve better search rankings, you can also go out on the web and ” Get the word out” and let more people know about your site.
You can add your site to directories(blog directories ,etc) you can also add your site to business directories, or white pages or yellow pages listings…..(some of these are free) …You can also do press releases….
Here’s a great post called White Hat – SEO tactics on the Beanstalk-inc.com website.
The Beanstalk article has some quite useful tips on applying White Hate SEO , only I would not go with doing link exchanging, as this can lead to problems depending how you go about it….(many link exchange methods fall into grey hat or black hat SEO)…..
Okay, you told us about White hat SEO, what about Black Hat SEO methods?
(1). Hidden text.
Many sites use hidden text as a way to manipulate their search engine results by trying to fool the search engines.
(2). Doorway links or hidden links(redirects, etc).
Many sites have hidden links that send visitors to pages not even related to the content intended by the links description.
So it may say in the link(hyperlink text) that you are being sent to a linked post to read more on that topic. Yet, you are redirected or sent to a page that has nothing to do at all with the post content subject, and is usually a sales page.
You may even be sent to another website (often the same owner as the site you are on) where you end up on a landing page or sales page…
(Authors note: ) I have had this experience before on sites that were quite well known, and they kept sending me to pages on other websites that were not even related to the post topic, so I stopped hitting any links in their posts….and also try to avoid that site altogether….
(3). Keyword Stuffing.
You have probably heard the term Keyword stuffing before and it fits perfectly with a typical Black Hat SEO tactic…
Keyword Stuffing is when someone puts a huge number of their target keywords throughout their posts content, in their post title, post description, meta description, meta keywords, etc…..
The acceptable % of Keywords in a White Hat SEO campaign would be from 1.5% to 2.5% to (at the most) of total content word count.
So if you write a post that’s 1000 words you could have your keyword in there from 10 to 25 times and it would fall under white hat seo(you could probably go for 3% though it may look like keyword spam in the post)….
Here’s a clear simple description of Black Hat SEO in an article called What is Black Hat SEO? on the Webopedia website.
There are plenty of other Black hat SEO tactics though, these three are quite important and can lead to a site being banned or penalized in the search engine ranking results…..
Your turn now!
What are your own thoughts and experiences with White hat SEO and Black Hat SEO methods?
Danny
There are a lot of black hat methods all over the net, but once you’re, caught you’re screwed. But sometimes, few people never get caught and it’s quite good that they are successful with what they are doing. White Hat methods may sometimes be a bit slow, but they are extremely effective.
Hi there , Ryan.
I think if we can find that place in between white hat seo and black hat seo, or what they refer to as Grey hat tactics….we may be far better
off.
I may be quite anti the black hat methods, though, I can also see the limitations placed on sites if we follow an ultra strict white hat seo strategy….
As you mentioned, White hat methods can be quite slow, and this is what probably leads people to using Black hat style tactics and trying to take a short cut…
To be quite honest, we can still do very well using white hat(basic) seo methods, only it’s a case of making the most of what we have to work within….
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There are probably far more options available to us within the boundaries of white hat than we realize.
Nice to see you here, Ryan.