What Is White Hat SEO?: Traditionally, in Western films, outlaws wear black hats while law-abiding guards wear white hats. The world of search engine optimization (SEO) is guided by this image: “Black hat” refers to SEO practices that go against search engine guidelines.
while “white hat” refers to those that conform to the rules. Learn how to follow White Hat SEO best practices and become the hero the internet needs.
This post will explain white hat SEO and which tactics are considered good versus bad white hat ones. Then, we’ll provide you with a list of the best white hat SEO techniques and discuss why they work and how to implement them.
What is White Hat SEO?
White hat SEO means following publicly available guidelines from search engines to make websites more useful. Although specific search engine guidelines may change over time, white hat SEO generally follows a consistent principle: SEO work is designed to make websites more useful to users and search engines. SEO strategists know that using white hat SEO will get your website to the top of the search engine results page (SERP) by making the content accessible and relevant.
White Hat vs. Black Hat SEO
White hat SEO is often described in contrast to black hat SEO. This is how they differ:
Black Hat SEO
Black hat SEO is any activity that violates search engine guidelines, aims to manipulate search engine algorithms, or degrades the user experience. Examples of black hat SEO tactics include buying links to your site from fake blog posts (that don’t read or provide any useful information), hiding keywords in white text on a white background section of a page, or redirecting a page rank in the SERPs to a page with a completely different title. Black hat SEO can cause a serious hit to your rankings that most websites will never recover from.
White Hat SEO
In contrast, search engines encourage and reward the implementation of white-hat SEO tactics. White hat SEO practices include creating useful content, getting quality backlinks, and optimizing your web pages for mobile.
5 Important White Hat SEO Strategies
- Publishing high-quality valuable content
- Including relevant keywords
- Earning backlinks
- Optimizing for user experience
- Configuring crawler settings
The following white hat SEO techniques are good ways to improve your website’s ranking in organic search results:
1. Publishing High-Quality Valuable Content
Regularly publishing quality, updated content is an effective white-hat SEO practice. Whether it’s a blog post, article, or landing page, you can target a new keyword with every new page you create. Google and other search engines consider every page that is unique, authentic, and useful as valuable content.
As you develop your content marketing strategy, create content that your audience will want. Avoid overly repetitive content and don’t copy. Your content should be original and in demand.
2. Including Relevant Keywords
Optimizing your website for keywords related to common search terms is a widely accepted SEO practice. White hat keyword optimization processes include:
- Conducting keyword research. Use a keyword research tool like Google Keyword Planner or Moz to identify target keywords related to your content.
- Include keywords in title tags. To indicate to search algorithms that your content is relevant to common search terms, add keywords to your title tags. Here’s a fairly simple process: If you’re writing a blog post about the best mineral sunscreen, include the keyword “mineral sunscreen” in your title. To avoid being perceived as black hat, make sure your page titles are unique and specific, and don’t unnecessarily repeat keywords.
- Write meta descriptions that include relevant keywords. Use your meta description to accurately summarize the content of your page. This is a great opportunity to use secondary keywords related to your primary keyword.
Use keywords in articles. Headings are also great for using your main keyword and long-tail keywords (phrases made up of multiple words).
3. Earning Backlinks
Backlinks are links from other websites to your website. Search engines consider this a recommendation: if your site receives a link from another reputable site, it is an indication that the other site trusts your content enough to share it with their readers.
Backlinks are often associated with black hat SEO as they are often misused (for example, paying websites to link to your site is considered black hat). However, the right backlink is an important part of a white-hat SEO strategy. White hat SEO techniques for getting backlinks include:
- Excellent content. The best way to earn white hat backlinks is to create great content that your readers will naturally want to link to in their content.
- Broken link structure. It involves finding broken links on other sites, creating content to replace the broken link, and then suggesting the site owner replace the broken link with a link to your new content.
- Testimonials. Witness Writing testimonials about a product or service that you have used and can recommend can lead to backlinks to your site.
Shopify SEO expert Antonio Santarsiero recommends e-commerce sites use a backlink strategy. “It’s best to get backlinks from reputable websites that are relevant to your product or industry. For example, if you sell athletic shoes, a backlink from a well-known running blog is likely to improve your Google trust score more than one.” Backlink from a pet food blog Using this idea, you will see many online backlink opportunities arising from real offline interactions can arise.
4. Optimizing for User Experience
Search engines want the websites they see to load quickly and be easy to use on all devices. Optimizing your website’s mobile or tablet experience—be it for speed or layout—is one of the surest white hat SEO techniques. Google provides diagnostic tools like PageSpeed Insights and mobile-friendly tests to help you improve your experience.
5. Configuring Crawler Settings
By default, search engine crawlers try to crawl every page on your site. There are times when this can cause problems without any other context. For example, if your site has one version of a page that lists products for Canadians in Canadian dollars and another version that lists them in US dollars. It. Dollars for Americans, the content can be very similar, which Google may see as duplicate content.
Search engines provide several white hat tools to tell crawlers where to look. To solve the above problem, use hreflang tags that specify local versions of pages. Other tools you can use to target crawlers include your sitemap (list of related pages), robots.txt file (universal rules for crawling), and index/noindex meta tags (page-specific rules for crawling).
Bring Away
By following white hat SEO practices, you can improve your website’s ranking in organic search results and develop a sustainable SEO strategy. Your SERP visibility helps you reach an audience that is searching for your products and services. And if you can only use one strategy?
Paul Shapiro, Head of Technical SEO and SEO Product Management at Shopify, recommends e-commerce entrepreneurs focus on their backlink strategy: “The importance of creating the right content to get backlinks cannot be overstated. Your goal is to create something that others find valuable and worthy.”. Whatever that means: providing original data, a clear opinion, or an opinion relevant to another person or article topic.