White hat SEO is a form of SEO strategy that is considered to be by the book and ethical in terms of Google and other search engine guidelines. Actions performed in this type of strategy may not bring in short-term wins but will prevent your website from being penalized compared to using a Grey or Black Hat strategy. White Hat SEO involves a basic SEO strategy of Keyword Research, On Page SEO Optimization, Writing Great Content, and an Ethical Backlink Strategy. A White Hat SEO strategy does not entertain the tactics of a grey or black hack strategy which can involve underhanded tactics, growth hacking techniques, and more. The benefit of such a strategy is sustainability, so for example, a marketing company, they can’t risk using many grey and black hat techniques with a client for fear of losing credibility if rankings dropped due to a new algorithm or if the client’s website was given a manual penalty. As they say, slow and steady wins the race.

Why Are White Hat SEO Techniques Important?

White Hat SEO techniques are very important as they are the foundation of every SEO strategy. Implementing only best practices in your SEO strategy will ensure that your strategy will be sustainable and potentially be able to keep rankings through many Google Algorithm updates which may affect other websites that implemented more grey and black hat techniques.

So what is Grey and Black Hat SEO, what are the benefits of using a strategy like those and what can go wrong?

Grey Hat SEO

Grey Hat SEO is a strategy that mostly uses white hat techniques but may break the rules a little bit. This can be using some AI content, buying backlinks or any practice that is seen as bad practices by Google which is used to artificially increase your website’s rankings. Grey Hat SEO experts, only use these types of techniques in moderation and are very cautious when implementing some of these techniques. This strategy can be good to get results faster but can lead to drops in traffic when an algorithm updates if they weren’t careful but oftentimes or not, these types of techniques can work for longer periods of time as Googles Ai struggles to detect these types of actions.

Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO involves using growth hacks, exploitations, and tactics that can artificially inflate ranking positions. Techniques like this include, manipulating website click-through rates with tools or software, building PBN’s websites to build website authority fast, using tools to drive fake relevant organic traffic or buying backlinks in bulk. This type of strategy can bring in a lot of traffic in the short term, but the downside could be getting a manual penalty and losing your traffic and rankings. Black Hat SEO experts usually use these techniques or secondary tier 2 or 3 websites which they are willing to lose if necessary and will use these websites to link to their money website in order to grow its rankings and eliminate a lot of risk of losing results on the main website.

What is involved in a White Hat SEO Strategy?

A White Hat SEO Strategy is an approach to search engine optimization that does not violate any search engine guidelines. It is also known as an ethical way of driving traffic to your website. It provides reliable results without the need for unethical practices such as Black Hat or Grey Hat SEO techniques. Below are some of the White Hat SEO techniques involved when implementing a white hat strategy.

Keyword Research

SEO keyword research is the process of discovering which keywords are the most relevant and most likely to bring traffic to a website. The main goal of SEO keyword research is to find keywords that have high search volume but low competition so that they can be used in the on-page optimizationprocess. Using tools like Ubersuggest, Keyword Planner or Keywords Everywhere, etc you can identify low-medium competition keywords that you have a good chance to rank high in the search engine for that could drive relevant traffic to your website.

Writing Great SEO Optimized Content that visitors will love

On-page SEO is the most crucial part of a White Hat SEO Strategy, this allows search engines to understand what your website is about. You can optimize a page or post by including your keyword and related keywords in the content, the titles, image metadata, and in the SEO Title and Meta Description, etc.
While this is important, the expression content is king and is very valuable in SEO. Google and other search engines are pushing great content that answers the visitor’s search intent. So content that is in detail, reads very well, covers a lot of frequently asked questions, and has images, graphs, and references to other sources will make that piece of content very useful to the user and will help the content rank better.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the process of fixing technical errors on your website that may be holding you back in terms of your website’s ranking abilities. For example improving factors such as website speed, creating a robots.txt file to eliminate pages on your website that you don’t want to rank, making your website easier to crawl and only including the best pages such as your products, service pages, and blog posts.

Backlink Building

The conscious effort of building backlinks could be considered somewhat grey hat but even the best White Hat SEO experts will tell you backlinks are a huge part of the puzzle when getting a website to rank. Doing this ethically would be creating business directories for your website, creating a press release to send out to news websites with an engaging story about your business, or offering to guest post on other websites and creating great content that people would want to backlink as a source of good information.

Looking for more information on search engine optimization and how it can help your business? Or maybe you need help ranking your website? At Brandigital, we help businesses grow online by increasing their leads and sales. Give us a shout at [email protected]