White Hat SEO
White Hat SEO is defined as any SEO tactic that maintains the integrity of your website and the SERPs (search engine results pages) is considered a “white-hat” search engine optimization practice. White Hat SEO practices will only enhance rather than detract from your website and from the rankings.
The fundamentals of White Hat SEO include the basics elements of site optimization as follows:
Quality Content: Content is king when it comes to SEO. Utilizing relevant well written information that accurately describes your website and/or its products is the number 1 way to improve your white hat approach. A search engines goal is to serve up what it believes to be the most appropriate website for any given search/query to the end user.
Site Structure: Systematically structuring the organization of your website helps search engines understand the content of your webpage which is good thing. Making proper keyword use of heading elements is essential because search engines give more weight
to the content within the heading elements.
Using a CSS style sheet to separate and organize the design elements from the content makes for much cleaner code and makes it easier for search engines to find the user is searching for. And what they are searching for is hopefully relevant content. And don’t forget content is king!
Titles and Meta Tag Info: Providing pages with proper titles and meta data is essential. However, meta tag titles and descriptions have been so abused in the past by black-hat SEO’s that they are becoming less important in the overall search engine formula. Titles however, still carry a lot of weight and when we think of systematic hyper text mark-up it is obvious why. The title of anything is a declaration as to what the content might be. Therefore, make sure your page titles are a true representation of the content of the page. And it never hurts to utilize your keywords within the page titles.
Keyword Research – Defining Effective Keywords: Create your website with keywords and key phrases in mind. Research keywords and key phrases you think people might use to find your site. Single words are not always the most effective target, try multi-word phrases that are much more specific to your product/service and you’ll be targeting end users that are much more likely to want what you are offering.
BackLinks – Or inbound Links: A backlink is links back to your website from another domain/website or location on the web. Having inbound links to your website can be likened to having a vote for the good but there are good links and bad links so therefore votes for the good and votes that are bad. Good links are links from other web pages that are regarded highly by the search engines and are contextually relevant to the content of your page. Bad links are links from web pages that aren’t regarded highly or potentially banned by search engines and have no relevance to the content of your page.
