Updated May 20, 2023
What is White Hat SEO?
White hat SEO means the SEO tactics that follow and work according to search engines’ terms and conditions, like Google. It improves the search rankings on SERP (search engine results page) while securing the website’s integrity and following the search engine terms and conditions. It is also called ethical SEO. It is done through organic link building, i.e., by natural linking to other websites.
Its goal is to build a quality website that keeps the website’s audience a priority or point of interest. White hat SEO adheres to all rules and policies of major search engines. It stops webmasters from cheating the audience and providing untrustworthy information. White hat SEO aims to provide relevant information on the site and to present it honestly.
Techniques of White Hat SEO
Below are some White Hat SEO Techniques mentioned:
1. Good content
Unique, well-formed, and well-written content makes the website more valuable and trustworthy to visitors and search engines. It optimizes the website to get a high position in the search engine’s search list as the search engine gives the most appropriate website to the customers and visitors for their search.
2. Proper use of keywords, metatags, and titles
The HTML code information is called metadata. It provides the crawlers with information about the site for indexing purposes and classification. So, proper keywords, metadata, and keywords should be added to the metadata.
3. Ease of navigation
Search engines also consider ease of navigation. Simultaneously, search engines assess the site’s usefulness, so it is important to use universally recognizable links instead of irrelevant ones. Both users, as well as crawlers need to index the sites.
4. Site performance
The website and page’s performance is also considered to assess the sites. The crawlers of search engines do not index the unavailable pages and sites. The unavailability of a page or a site for even a day or a week can highly affect the site’s traffic. So it is important that the site loads faster and is accessible easily and always.
5. Quality inbound links
Search engines frequently assess backlinks for relevant purposes, so sites should have quality inbound links. Search engines penalize or discount sites that contain irrelevant backlinks.
6. Have short URLs
Several studies have shown that search engines rank shorter URLs (uniform resource locators) higher than more lengthy ones. Putting some keywords into the URLs is perfect; making crawlers help you rank your website higher. In short, the URL of your website must be clean and short, with some keywords mixed with it. It would help if you preferred using hyphens “-“as word separators.
7. Optimize the images
Image optimization means using images to help your website advance rankings. Remember to address some items with the images so that they can fulfill Google’s standards and policies. While using an image, you must keep in mind that the image must be compressed and clear so that it will not affect your site’s performance and speed. Try using keywords for naming your image so that Google can easily comprehend the image.
8. Use google search console
Google search console helps you tell Google about your view of the way you want your website’s search results to appear and about the version of the website you prefer to use. Google helps you understand how people find the site and identify the main keywords. It also alerts you about issues with your website that require your urgent attention or necessitate changes. This console will also help you know if hackers have done anything to your site and if any penalties affect your website.
9. Submit a sitemap to google
The search console mentioned above allows you to submit sitemaps to Google, which would help it know your pages’ location. It also gives Google a roadmap to each page of your site and helps to upgrade the importance of the page.
10. Encourage social shares and comments
Google considers your page’s shares and comments as an engagement factor. If the comments share is very high, Google rewards the page or article by advancing its ranking.
Advantages of White Hat SEO
Given below are the advantages mentioned:
- It safeguards your business’ reputation.
- Results of white hat SEO are slow and steady.
- Better ROI.
- It offers quality information to the users.
- It helps to get positive feedback from users, which allows advancing your rank.
- No secrets from users and search engines.
- Free from penalty.
- Cost-effective.
- It helps in building stronger relationships.
Problems
- The major problem of white hat SEO is the limited scope. On-page optimization can be done, but possibilities are meager and limited unless you want to end up on a grey hat or black hat SEO when doing off-page optimization.
- Google has mentioned not to use unnatural link building like spam methods in Webmaster Guidelines.
- Another problem faced by white hat SEO is competition. It isn’t easy to supersede the highly optimized website only by using White hat SEO. However, other SEO, like black or grey, leads to a penalty.
Conclusion
In this article, we have discussed white hat SEO in detail. It is the cleanest way to optimize your website and follow all search engine terms and conditions. Using it helps increase or lawfully advance your website’s ranking without incurring penalties and degrading your reputation.
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