subject: White Hat Seo Techniques [print this page] Often referred to as White hat SEO or Ethical SEO this is a system of Search Engine Optimisation that is designed for humans.
Basically, White hat SEO is interesting and relevant content that will be enjoyed by those of us who can live and breathe. It is article writing that has some value to its subject and is a worthwhile read.
Of course, although it will be an interesting article it does have to have some other attributes to make it valuable as an SEO tool. It is important to include good quality keywords or phrases that are relevant to the article. It is important that these keywords are an easy read in the article and not just sprinkled all over the place without making sense. Another factor is backlinks or hyperlinks. These are keywords that will lead back to your website landing page. Reciprocal links will lead back to your own website but you'll have to link to theirs. Link popularity is a measure or algorithm of the search engines which determines where your website is listed in its Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
So, that is what it is supposed to do but what makes it different from other forms of SEO?
At the other end of the spectrum is Black Hat SEO. Black hat involves trying to trick the search engines into giving you a higher rank, using questionable tactics in order to increase your page rank.
In the extreme, you could throw together a load of keywords and backlinks and they need not even make sense. This could be very effective short term but the crawlers used by the search engines are cleverer than that! These little spiders catch on very quickly to text like this and disregard it as spam and render the text ineffective. Black Hat SEO is very risky and short term and not ethical.
In between White hat SEO and Black Hat SEO is Gray Hat SEO which, as you can probably guess is a bit of both. Essentially it is less risky than Black Hat SEO but not as ethical as White Hat SEO.
Of course, the search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing prefer White Hat SEO as it brings credibility to its site. The search engines are only useful if we, the user, can find what we are looking for without having to sift through a load of spammy text. I bet there are loads of you out there who have changed your e mail account because of the unacceptable level of spam you receive. Just like e mail accounts have filters, the search engines filter out unwanted spam so Black Hat SEO gets found out very quickly.
If your website needs to be promoted and you want it to be credible and long standing then White hat SEO is the only way to go.
