The idea behind White Hat SEO (or ethical search engine optimization) is that you will create content for your website that people will want to read or connect with. So what are the best white hat SEO techniques you should be using right now?
The Best White Hat SEO Techniques
This article is to provide insights on the top five white hat SEO strategies for user engagement and growth. It also informs readers of the importance of good data for a successful SEO campaign and how to keep your website in Google’s favor.
What is White Hat SEO?
For any website owner, it is important to understand that there are two ways to do SEO. White Hat SEO is the more ethical way, and Black Hat SEO is the more aggressive way.
So what is White Hat SEO?
This is the process of performing SEO tactics that provide a good human experience – useful and relevant information to a user’s search. As part of Google’s regulations, creating content with users in mind is one of the best practices to improve your search rankings.
What is the Difference Between White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO?
White hat SEO is a holistic approach to SEO using a combination of strategies such as link building and creating content that is specifically made to rank well on search engines. It means staying in Google’s favor by:
- following the rules and regulations of Google.
- providing a good user experience
- delivering quality content that is relevant to a user’s search
We’ll expand on the best white hat SEO techniques a bit later in this post.
Black hat SEO is a strategy where the content you create for your website does not follow the rules and regulations laid out by Google. This will eventually lead to penalties from Google that can severely damage your website’s ranking abilities.
Black hat SEO may include keyword stuffing, spammy link building tactics, and content automation, to name a few techniques.
Why White Hat SEO is Best
The idea behind White Hat SEO (or ethical search engine optimization) is that you will create content for your website that people will want to read or connect with. You won’t resort to any spammy tactics like cloaking, keyword stuffing, or hidden text in order to rank your site on top of Google’s first page.
This type of search engine optimization also relies on best practices like using keywords in titles and meta descriptions and writing compelling content that people will want to link to on social media or from other articles.
White Hat SEO isn’t too spammy or manipulative.
The Best White Hat SEO Techniques
To rank higher on SERPs, it’s important to use white hat SEO techniques to remain compliant with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
1. Content Generation
The first step to creating a content marketing strategy is to define your target audience. This way, you can tailor your message to the people who are most likely to be interested in it. If you are creating content for a company, it’s also helpful for you to understand their business model and what they are trying to sell.
You would then need to determine the best channels through which you can reach your audience. Channels are any kind of communication that you use on the internet, such as blogs, social media sites, or video hosting sites. Once you have identified these channels, think about what type of content might appeal most to them and what format would work best for each channel.
Then, do research to determine keywords people are using to search for products or services like yours.
The next step is to create quality content around those keywords, adding links as appropriate to other relevant sources as well as within your own site.
Creating blog posts? This is how to optimize content for Google and users!
2. User Experience
User experience is a field of design that focuses on the end user’s experience with a website or application. UX design starts with research, which includes studying current trends and buying patterns to find out what people want.
The goal of UX design is to create an interface that appeals to as many people as possible.
UX design is not just about how something looks, it also includes how it works. It is an interdisciplinary field that requires skills from psychology, engineering and marketing among others.
Search Engine Journal explains how to improve SEO with user experience factors.
3. Link Building
There are three main categories of links:
1) Internal links, which are links from one page on a website to another page on the same site.
2) Outbound links, which are links from your website to another site.
3) Inbound links, which are links to your site from other sites.
A good link-building campaign seeks to acquire links (a.k.a. hyperlinks) from other websites to yours.
Search engines will use links to discover new pages and help determine how well a webpage should rank in SERPs (search engine results pages).
While link building is great for SEO (and can improve domain authority), it’s important to note that not all links are created equal.
Instead, choose to build links in the following ways:
- Building social media profiles.
- Creating a Google My Business profile, which benefits Local SEO.
- Gaining links from high domain authority sites.
- Gaining links from niche-relevant websites.
Although this is not an inclusive list, you can start to build links to your website by:
- Providing guest posts to websites discussing your niche.
- Participating in interviews or providing your expertise for news stories, podcasts and more.
- Having influencers mention your brand, product or service in blogs, social media, video reviews and more.
Aside from the benefits for SEO, link building campaigns can be a great way to build relationships, receive referral traffic and build brand awareness.
4. Use of Schema Markup
Schema is code that can be added to a web page that can create Rich Snippets.
Rich Snippets provide additional information in search engine results pages that can be useful to users.
Schema also helps search engine crawlers (like Google) to better understand a page.
Schema markup can include, but is not limited to:
- Local Business.
- Products.
- Reviews.
- Aggregate Ratings.
- Recipes.
- Person.
And many more!
5. A Fast Website
Do you really have to worry about how fast your website is?
Yes!
Google Search (and even Google Ads) is now ranking websites based on their speed and it’s even more important when it comes to ranking for mobile searches.
A well thought out SEO strategy would include running a technical audit of your website and identifying some key ranking and speed factors that should be addressed including:
- Reducing redirects
- Optimizing images.
- Suggest using a Content Distribution Network (CDN).
- And other factors that can improve site performance.
While not all SEO experts are also web developers, they can make the recommendations and often have a web developer in house or can recommend one to help bring your website “up to speed.”
White Hat SEO is a sustainable and successful marketing strategy for your business!
White hat SEO can be a sustainable and successful marketing strategy for your business. At the end of the day, it all comes down to what techniques you use to market your products or services and how much energy and budget you put into your efforts.
A great SEO strategy will include these techniques and more to help improve your ranking and build your domain authority.
Are you too busy to learn all this terminology? Are you concerned you won’t know the difference between a white hat or black hat SEO strategy when trying to implement new campaigns?
Let our SEO experts help you with a sound and effective SEO plan!
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