White Hat SEO

We’re Proud to be White Hat SEO Consultants

What is meant by a “white hat SEO”? A white hat SEO follows the quality guidelines set forth by major search engines like Google and Bing.

Being a white hat SEO means you keep up to date on search engine guidelines, read their instructions for creating good content and strong SEO, and you actually follow the SEO best practices presented.

Google also clearly states what they consider to be best practices for websites and content. If you’re a white hat SEO, you stay up to date on this information and you make sure your actions stay well inside the rules.

On the other side of SEO (aka the dark side of SEO) is “black hat SEO”. Surprisingly enough, there are still plenty of black hat SEO consultants who pretend to be white hat SEOs.

Google specifically describes what they consider to be illicit practices or black hat SEO, so it is very easy to avoid such tactics. Such practices can lead to a website being removed entirely from their index. Or in other words, your website is penalized and it may removed entirely from Google, thus not being available for search traffic.

Right now you’re probably wanting to know how you can tell a white hat SEO from their naughty black hat counterparts. It’s actually fairly easy.

White Hat SEO Tactics

• Have a well planned, easy to navigate website
• Write quality content that is unique
• Write for users and not the search engine spiders
• Have accurate and unique meta descriptions and titles
• Use accurate alt tags for images and links
• Create an XML sitemap and submit it to the major search engines
• Build off page branding and high quality, industry focused inbound links
• Create a solid robot.txt file
• Watch visitor bounce rates and improve content and/or formatting where needed

Black Hat SEO Tactics

• Thin content that offers no real value to website visitors
• Keyword stuffing and using irrelevant words
• Hidden text or links
• Cloaking or redirects
• Publishing multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with virtually the same content
• Using doorway pages
• Interlinking
• Buying inbound links in an effort to distort search engine rankings

With SEO it is buyer beware. Know your SEO and know your SEO’s tactics well before you hire him.

Ask your SEO his or her feelings on white hat SEO vs. black hat SEO. And if you are considering hiring us, know that we are strictly white hat SEO and we promise to adhere such practices.