White Hat SEO
What is White Hat SEO?
White Hat SEO generally refers to accepted SEO techniques that can have a positive impact on search engine rankings, without trying to trick search engines. White Hat is the opposite of Black Hat SEO, which uses unfair SEO techniques in order to trick search engine algorithms into believing that certain content is relevant and high quality, when in fact it is not.
White Hat vs Black Hat SEO
WHS comprises all the SEO techniques that comply with search engine rules. As opposed to Black Hat SEO, White Hat is a legitimate way of increasing a websites’ ranking in search engines.
White Hat is legitimate, but Black Hat SEO goes against search engine standards. Black Hat SEO usually only has short-term effects, if any, as it is detected and penalized. The penalty can be the removal of the website from all search engine results.
What SEO techniques are considered to be White Hat?
Generally, White Hat is defined by exclusion, as everything that is not Black Hat SEO. However, please keep in mind these general rules, in order to stay within search engine guidelines:
Write content that is easily readable by humans, not just by search engines. While it is recommended to use keywords when writing content, this should not be overdone. The text should not be stuffed with too many keywords and the webpage should only include those keywords that are relevant to the content. Search engines have a semantical understanding, so they know what words to expect in a text.
Write original, quality content. Avoid duplicate content and plagiarism.
Have a good website structure, which helps users and search engines make sense of how your content is organized.
Keep technical SEO in check, in order to make sure there are no broken links, crawlability errors or coverage issues with any parts of your website. This also includes making an effort to have good page load speeds for your pages, which increases user satisfaction and search engine rank.
Try to grow your domain authority and search rankings organically, through natural links and other links from authority websites, as opposed to using link farms and buying bulk hyperlinks from untrusted sources.
