What Is White Hat SEO?

White Hat, Black Hat. What’s the difference?

In the world of SEO, there are two approaches to take: White hat and Black hat. These are essentially rule-abiding (white hat) and rule-breaking (black hat) ways to get a website ranked highly in a search engine.

White Hat SEO

The use of white hat SEO is basically keeping in line with search engine rules and best practices guidelines. White hat SEO is for long term gains that are for the overall benefit of the actual website visitors rather than just the manipulation of search engine algorithms to get your site (temporarily) boosted up a search engine results page (SERP).

This practice involves developing the site in a positive manner that will benefit website visitors. This can include writing blog posts that are unique in content and provide useful information in relevant forms, such as text, video and images. Good content will naturally generate links to your website from across the web, giving a boost to rankings as you become known as an expert in your field.

Adding appropriate page titles, meta descriptions and headings to your content will all help rank in search engines in a ‘white hat’ manner.

Interact-IT only uses white hat techniques to gain Google rankings as this is the most effective long term technique.

For a free SEO review of your website, please get in touch with us via our contact form, or call on 01257 429 217

Black Hat SEO

On the other side of the SEO coin is black hat SEO. This is a generally deceptive way of implementing SEO techniques to increase search engine ranking. There are many techniques that black hat operatives will be able to use, and regardless of the walls that search engines put in place, there will always be a way to ‘cheat’ the system.

One of the techniques that the users of black hat operators use are to list websites on link farms. These are places on the web that only exist to link to other websites. When they are discovered, they are punished by search engines. Any websites that are linked to them also pushed down the rankings due to being involved in bad SEO practices.

There are many agencies that use this technique. If you see advertising or an email that promises 10,000 links to your site inside a week or a month, then you can be sure that this technique is what will be used. This technique may work well for a short term gain, but when the search engines catch up with you, you can be removed from the search engine, with no guarantee that you will be able to get back on.

The secret of links is a little known factor called link juice.  This is kind of like a search engine currency that judges the strength and authority of the website. If your website is linked to – from a website with high authority in your field – this will work well for you and boost your website up the rankings. However, if your website is linked to lots of websites with low authority (like link farms) then this will eventually damage your website.

You can find out more about black hat SEO here