White Hat SEO refers to legitimate techniques used to increase a website's ranking on SERPs, in line with Webmaster Guidelines and search engine algorithms.
Why Is White Hat SEO Important?
White hat SEO is important because these techniques keep everything above board and ensure that high-quality websites fill SERPs. Complying with Webmaster Guidelines means that web pages are rewarded and avoid being hit with a Google Penalty.
Certain penalties can also be incredibly hard to bounce back from, whereas white hat SEO techniques are long-term and effective strategies that increase SERP ranking, engagement and conversion rates.
What Are Some White Hat SEO Techniques?
There are many white hat SEO techniques that don’t get websites in trouble and instead increase a site’s authority and popularity. Below are some of the most important:
1. Create Valuable and High-Quality Content
This one may seem pretty obvious and simple, but you’d be surprised. Instead of using content farming to generate articles, create unique and insightful content. Make sure your website is free from grammatical and punctual errors. And, strictly NO article spinning.
Create well researched and easily digestible content, related to your website that fulfils the searcher’s query. Use short snappy sentences that are easy to read.
Create content for the user.
2. Ensure Quality and Legitimate Link-Building
Link building is one of the most important SEO techniques for ranking. And, unfortunately, there is no quick fix. It will require a lot of effort and planning. You must create content that other websites with similar content will want to link to.
For this technique, reach out to other companies and organisations and explain your value to them. You could even request to write a contributing blog on their platform. Think big.
Good link-building also helps Google find new websites.
3. On-Page SEO
Optimising the components of your page is also an essential white hat SEO technique. This means making sure your title tags and meta description are insightful, punchy and include relevant keywords. This goes for your URL and image alt text too!
4. Conduct Exceptional Keyword Research
Great keyword research is at the heart of good white hat SEO. It might be time-consuming, but it is a rewarding long-term strategy (and one you’ll need to keep revisiting). For this technique, you will need to look inward.
What is the basis of your company? Who are your audience? What keywords do they use? And don’t forget to examine your competitors too.
Analyse keyword difficulty and popularity – this will steer you onto the road of success.
Tools to help you with White Hat SEO?
There is an extensive range of tools to help websites optimise their pages with white hat SEO techniques. These tools include:
An easy way to increase web visibility and traffic is to use high-value keywords. Wordtracker can help you accomplish this effortlessly. This research tool is robust and efficient; capable of generating about 2,000 high-performing keywords per search.
Its Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) feature identifies high volume words or phrases rarely used by the competition thereby giving your site an SEO advantage. Another feature is its ability to assess the size and potential of your target audience.
With this insight, you can use keywords that are appealing to profitable niche markets.
One of the easiest ways to improve the quality of your content is to ensure that it’s free of grammatical errors. Grammarly is a writing assistant that reviews spelling, vocabulary, punctuation and grammar in real-time.
It uses an algorithm that detects clarity, plagiarism and style.
This tool is available as a browser extension or an app and is accessible to iOS or Android users. Although this service is free, there is a premium plan which tracks piracy, tone and offers a variety of peppy sentences for a fee.
Having your content shared on various websites is a great way to come off as an authority on a certain subject and boost your search rankings. Consider it as a vital part of your content marketing strategy.
What better way to reach out to websites & influencers in your industry than by promoting your content via email. Hunter is an email finder that digs up the contact information of your target market and prevents your messages from being listed as spam.
Hunter offers a free version and can be used as an add-on or integrated with other CRM tools.
There are many reasons why a website may not be highly ranked by search engines regardless of how good the content is. At times web crawlers may regard it as “low quality” because it contains broken URLs, duplicated pages, texts, titles, meta description, etc.
Problems like these can prevent a page from being indexed thus causing low web traffic. Netpeak Spider is a user-friendly SEO crawler that identifies web optimization issues, categorizes them as errors, warnings or notices, and proffers possible solutions.
How Can We Help?
Worried you’ve been steered down the shady route of black hat SEO in your business? We’re here to help.
Contact us and we’ll hook you up with a great marketing team that can help you see the light!
If your budget won’t allow that just yet, we also have some awesome training courses that will set you up with tried and tested SEO practises to improve your rankings and get you where you want to be.
