White Hat SEO

White Hat SEO is the process of executing a Search Engine Optimisation strategy which is within the Search Engine guidelines. White Hat SEO generally takes longer to obtain results however the rewards are more fruitful in the long term and more sustainable as opposed to Black Hat SEO. The main goal of your online marketing strategy which is White Hat is to make your strategy look natural. Webmasters can make their strategy look natural to search engines by executing segments in moderation for instance, websites who generate a large amount of links in a short amount of time may be flagged with the search engines and manually penalized. There are guidelines set by Search Engines, Google in particular, and they are split within three different categories;

Design and content guidelines

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map has an extremely large number of links, you may want to break the site map into multiple pages.

• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.

• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.

• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.

• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the “ALT” attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.

• Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.

• Check for broken links and correct HTML.

• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.

Technical Guidelines

• Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

• Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.

• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.

• Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it’s current for your site so that you don’t accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you’re using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google Webmaster Tools.

• Make reasonable efforts to ensure that advertisements do not affect search engine rankings. For example, Google’s AdSense ads and DoubleClick links are blocked from being crawled by a robots.txt file.

• If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system creates pages and links that search engines can crawl.

• Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.

• Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.

Quality guidelines

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.

• Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.

• Don’t send automated queries to Google.

• Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.

• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

• Don’t create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.

• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

Google are flexible if you have executed Black Hat SEO by mistake and will give you the option to reconsider your website manually. White Hat SEO is basically using common sense when marketing your website, always think to yourself “If I was reviewing my marketing strategy, would I consider it to be natural?”