White-Hat SEO Tactics

What Is White-Hat SEO?

Any SEO tactic that maintains the integrity of your website and the SERPs (search engine results pages) is considered a “white-hat” search engine optimization tactic. In general, following Google’s Webmaster Guidelines will keep you and your site out of trouble.

These are the only tactics that we will use whenever applicable and which enhance rather than detract from your website and from the rankings.

White-Hat SEO Tactics:

Internal Linking

By far one of the easiest ways to stop your website from ranking well on the search engines is to make it difficult for search engines to find their way through it. Many sites use some form of script to enable fancy drop-down navigation, etc. Many of these scripts cannot be crawled by the search engines resulting in unindexed pages.

While many of these effects add visual appeal to a website, if you are using scripts or some other form of navigation that will hinder the spidering of your website it is important to add text links to the bottom of at least your homepage linking to all you key internal pages including a sitemap.

Content Creation

Don’t confuse “content creation” with doorway pages and the such. When we recommend content creation we are discussing creating quality, unique content that will be of interest to your visitors and which will add value to your site.

The more content-rich your site is, the more valuable it will appear to the search engines, your human visitors, and to other webmasters who will be far more likely to link to your site if they find you to be a solid resource on a related subject.

Creating good content can be very time-consuming, however it will be well worth the effort in the long run.

As an additional bonus, these new pages can be used to target additional keywords related to the topic of the page.

Writing For Others

You understand more about your business than anyone else, so why not let everyone know?

Whether it be in the form of articles, forum posts, or a spotlight piece on someone else’s website, creating content that other people will want to read and post on their sites is one of the best ways to build links to your website.

Site Optimization

The manipulation of your content, wording, and site structure for the purpose of attaining high rankings is the backbone of SEO and the SEO industry.

Everything from creating solid titles and descriptions to tweaking the content to maximize it’s search engine effectiveness, is key to any successful optimization effort.

That said, it is of primary importance that the optimization of a website not detract from the message and quality of content contained within it. There’s no point in driving traffic to a site that is so poorly worded that it cannot possibly convey the desired message and which thus, cannot sell.

Further, keyword stuffing hasn’t worked in well over a decade.

Site optimization must always take into account the maintenance of the salability and solid message of the site while maximizing it’s exposure on the search engines.

For additional information on site optimization tactics that work feel free to browse our SEO articles.