What You Need To Know About White Hat SEO

SEO can seem like a real pain to learn, and for this sole purpose, many people skip right over it. However, what they don’t know is that without utilizing Google’s SEO (search engine optimization) properly, they aren’t getting the traffic and success from their website that could be a potential had they taken a couple of minutes to figure it out all. That’s also not to mention that SEO isn’t a difficult thing to learn. You just have to stay on top of it, so let’s get you started with White Hat SEO.

What Is White Hat SEO?

Great question, and an even greater place to start when figuring out SEO. White Hat SEO is all about the ethical things you can do to improve the ranking of your website within Google’s search engine. How is this different from regular SEO? The white hat tactics are geared more towards your audience as opposed to the search engines per se, while still following the search engine rules and guidelines that Google has put in place. “White Hat” also refers to the good kind of computer hackers; the ones that use their expertise to secure your system as oppose to exploiting it.

White Hat SEO Techniques

SEO is packed with all kinds of techniques and tools you can practice to place your website at a higher ranking, and the white hat ones pertain to gaining long-term results as opposed to immediate ones like PPC (pay per click). While complying with Google’s webmaster guidelines, you must also be providing the same quality of content that Google indexes, and one of the most important things you could know is that white hat SEO focuses on the people as mentioned previously. Thus, the content you provide can’t just be for Google rankings, and must be readable, high quality content that people can actually use.

White Hat VS. Black Hat

Now, you must be sure not to get white hat SEO and black hat SEO confused because the latter is the bad of the bunch and pertains to malicious hacking tactics. The techniques are very deceptive and manipulate the search rankings to get you a better ranking… Until Google catches you, that is. One of the most common black hat SEO tactics is keyword stuffing. So, black hat is bad, and white hat pertains to good content that is authentic.

That’s also not to mention that Google will find you if you are manipulating their search engine rankings, and then you’re penalized and not getting much for your websites. So, it is crucial to not only follow Google’s SEO guidelines, but to also practice the white hat SEO techniques.

About the Author: Carlos Caneja

With nearly two decades of career experience in IT and online commerce, West Palm Beach-based Carlos Caneja currently serves as President of britecode. Since its founding in 2010, the company offers customized, cutting-edge strategies to help clients achieve their goals—including branding, web design & development, SEO and online marketing. His company’s sophisticated strategies and unique understanding of client goals is driven by a one-on-one customer service-driven mandate, utilizing approaches that are fit best for every individual client. Carlos’ mantra for britecode: “Open dialogue is a must when working with our clients, as positive input helps us better understand what they want from each project. It’s how we’re able to consistently deliver results that amaze and impress our clients.” He previously worked for 11 years as COO with Applied Innovations, which provides a wide range of enterprise-grade Windows Hosting services to the online marketplace.

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