What is White Hat SEO?

If you are looking for an SEO company to help you market your website, you will definitely want to make sure they use White Hat SEO practices. All SEO companies will claim that they do, but it will be very easy for you to tell whether or not this is the case, if you do some research on them. So what is White Hat SEO? White Hat SEO methods are the approved, natural ways of building traffic to your website which are well document in The Google Webmaster Guidelines. These techniques often make for a pleasant user experience, and more importantly, they follow the rules and regulation of search engines.

An example of a White Hat SEO technique, as opposed to a black hat technique would be Backlink generation (White Hat), as opposed to link farming (Black Hat). Backlink generation is a process / set of techniques where some truly interesting and highly relevant content is created and then it is posted online. If the content is good, people will naturally share it with others, and thus the link is propagated across the web. Link farming, on the other hand, is the unethical practice of creating a group of sites, and then hyperlinking them all to one another, with no regard for relevancy. Backlink generation can be a very healthy way to increase the popularity of your site, while link farming will risk your website and your business through search engine penalties and the poor results of receiving non-relevant traffic.

There are countless White Hat SEO techniques, and good SEO companies who know search engines well come up with more every day. Here are a few safe and ethical practices used to increase search engine rankings for a website:

Internal Linking – Internal linking is a great way to build up your site’s popularity. Internal linking means that you link one page of your site to another. Search engines also respond well to internal linking, because it tells them that your site has relevant content worthy of being shown on multiple pages. It also suggests that your site is a cohesive unit.

Links to your site (Backlinks) – Getting someone to link back to your site in a one way link is great. You shouldn’t go for just any link, though. Have a high ranking (well respected) site link to your content in a way that is relevant to readers, and it will definitely have an impact.

Have Great Content – Search engines regard sites with lots of relevant content to be valuable. That doesn’t mean you can just fill your pages with random words, though. Your content should be unique and interesting enough that readers will spend some time on your site digesting it. You should also add content frequently, every day, or at least a few times a week if you can. Hosting a blog on your site is a great way to do this.

Fill in All Your Tags – By including alt and title tags on all pages, images, and links, you are telling search engines what sort of information is available on your site, which will help them index you better. It’s always a good idea to have an SEO Company work on your tags if you’re unfamiliar with SEO. They will know what keywords to use for you, and make sure that your site provides good information.

There are hundreds of techniques, processes and specialties used by White Hat SEO Companies to generate high search engine rankings for targeted, relevant keywords.  In addition the best SEO Companies pay equal attention to the conversion strategies to optimize the percentage of visitors that perform the “conversion act” and actually do exactly what you always hoped your visitors would do when you envisioned your website from the outset.

SEO processes are increasingly sophisticated as web technology as well as web users evolve in their understanding of how to find relevant information.  Our clients are actually paying us to know exactly what the Search Engines, the Social Media and ultimately what the consumer is looking for.  For more information don’t hesitate to contact us and we will be glad to help.