What is White Hat SEO?

April 11, 2011

It is important to follow search engine guidelines to assure natural high ranking of your website over a long-term campaign.

All businesses want to reach the top of the ranking list on search engines for obvious reasons. SEO (search engine optimisation) enables you to improve your site’s ranking by utilising various tools and techniques.

Search engines such as Google do not allow certain techniques and methods to be implemented. Guidelines are provided that must be followed to ensure your website has a natural ranking. Optimisation following these guidelines is known as white-hat SEO.

White-hat SEO techniques:

• Good quality content within your website
• Structural/semantic mark up and separate content (e.g. html) from style (e.g. CSS)
• Providing correct titles and meta data for each page of your website
• Research keywords
• Good quality inbound links etc.

It is important that your website doesn’t violate any of the search engine guidelines, as this practice is considered unethical and unfair. It may also get your website spam label or removed from search listings of search engines. This type of SEO is known as black-hat SEO and is to be avoided!

Your site can receive penalties as a result of black-hat optimisation. These penalties depend on the severity of the violation.

If you don’t have extensive knowledge of all of the guidelines and techniques it is best to leave it to a team of professionals to ensure you website stays on the right side of the track avoiding complications that could jeopardise your business.