White Hat SEO: The Definitive Guide

Table Of Contents

What is White Hat SEO?

Importance of white hat SEO

White hat SEO Vs. Black hat SEO

White hat SEO strategies:

1. Keyword Research
2. Valuable content
3. On-page SEO
4. Link building
5. Technical SEO
6. Fix errors

Introduction

''Rank your website in google's page#1 in just 24 hours!'' Have you seen this type of caption on YouTube? Well, you can find a few of these types of videos without any practical solution.

The ranking of a website or webpage on search engine result pages is determined by SEO. SEO comes in three types: White Hat, Black Hat, and Grey Hat. The ultimate factor is how well your website is optimized for search engine crawlers.

White hat SEO is like a marathon. It involves thorough keyword research, on-page, off-page, and technical optimization. To succeed, it's crucial to maintain a consistent strategy. Even after achieving a good ranking, you must continue your SEO efforts to retain it. Ranking on the first page is an ongoing process, and using ethical white hat SEO techniques is key to maintaining your position.

What is white hat SEO?

White hat SEO is a compilation of ethical and legitimate guidelines according to search engines to improve a webpage's ranking in search engine result pages. These are a few strategies apart from any shortcut path to be implemented under White Hat SEO.

The process will take you to long-term success without fooling the search engine.

White hat SEO provides better content and user experience, relevant content to users adhering to search engine guidelines.

It includes :

1. Keyword Research
2. Quality content
3. On-page optimization
4. Link building
5. Technical SEO

Importance of white hat SEO

Imagine, without white hat SEO, how would search results be? It would be like getting cupcake recipes against the search query for pasta recipes. People would get irrelevant, poor-quality content.

White hat SEO leads to good quality content and a better user experience for us.

1. Build brands

Building brands is not an overnight success. As white hat SEO strategies do not penalize websites, brands can keep their position on SERPs to get traffic. As these strategies are aligned with Google's guidelines, the search engine gives value to the websites that follow it.

2. Cost-effective

This is a low-cost or no-cost tactic, unlike black hat SEO. Using black hat techniques may cost you a penalty. Instead of this, put your money and effort into white hat SEO for great success.

3. User experience

It increases the use of search engines. Without white hat SEO, the user experience of search engines would not be this smooth. The goal of search engines is to provide the best content to users that matches user intent. Finding desired results and information keeps users coming back to search engines again and again. Ranking the best websites and providing the best content on the first pages makes the whole process a cakewalk, even for a novice. Every step of the process came into white hat SEO.

White hat SEO Vs. Black hat SEO

Black hat SEO techniques are against search engine guidelines. The words white and black come from old English movies where villains used to wear black hats, and heroes wear white hats. It is a metaphor. White hat means good, authentic ways, and black hat denotes evil, which means implausible ways. It uses the loopholes in guidelines and uses those to rank imminently on the first page. But the next thing that happens is search engines penalize and reduce their rank. Now look into the differences between white hat and black hat SEO:

• Black hat SEO provides poor quality, irrelevant, duplicate content, unlike best content by white hat SEO.
• In white hat, images are always well optimized with alt text and image names. But in black hat, image names and alt text may not be visible. It also uses outdated SEO practices like keyword stuffing and overuse.
• White hat follows an ethical link-building strategy, while black hat usually buys links for link-building.

The goal of black hat SEO is to get ranked in SERPs by hook or crook. While doing black hat webmaster does not think about user experience. It also includes putting malicious links or code on other websites.

All these techniques can be found in the search engine system.

White hat SEO strategies:

There are a few techniques that we can adapt for white hat SEO. Some of these are from on-page, off-page, and other methods. Google loves these SEO strategies so that we can trust them unquestioningly.

1. Keyword Research

Keyword research is the first step that you should work on. The keyword is the term that you type in the search box of a search engine while doing any queries. Search engines show relevant results based on the keyword you typed in the box. Website owners post content by targeting these keywords.

When a seller wants to rank a website to sell products or services, they must produce content relevant to targeted product-related keywords.

Let's say we are a digital marketing agency. To get buyers, we need to rank better. When users search for digital marketing-related queries, we need to show up in the first position. Only then do we get a client. Now, to satisfy user intent, we have to provide content based on digital marketing.

Let's dive into keyword research. You can use free SEO tools available online or just take advantage of the Google search bar for this purpose. Type your targeted keyword in the search bar.

Digital Marketing is the keyword we want to rank for. We can see some keywords related to digital marketing. The next step is choosing the right one from the list.

For picking up the right one you need to think about two parameters.

First is search volume, and second is keyword difficulty. Search volume is the number of people searching for the same word per month. Keyword difficulty is your number of competitors who have already provided high-quality content targeting the same keyword you want to rank for.

Here, we use the ah-refs free keyword generator tool. We can see search volume and keyword difficulty are both high for our keyword, and we can get keyword ideas from this. It means this is going to be very hard to rank for this keyword. Always remember, if you want to rank, you should go for high search volume+ low difficulty keyword. These are long-tail keywords. The search volume of long tail keywords is high and the difficulty is less.

We should choose a keyword, ranking for which is easy. Let's take " Best online digital marketing course in India''.

This keyword has a high search volume and relatively low difficulty. If we write high-quality content by targeting this, we can easily rank if one searches for it.

Another way to research an ideal keyword is to copy competitors' keywords. Find the best-competing site and copy the keywords they are targeting.

You can also use online communities like Reddit, Quora, and Answerthepublic to find the questions people are discussing.

In Answerthepublic, you can find related suggestions for a certain keyword.

So, a well-researched keyword helps you to plan your content. It brings organic traffic, which provides expertise and authority to your site. These elements are essential for white hat SEO strategy.

2. Valuable content

When you publish the best content without failing, your website must rank. Best content means:

• Long-form content

Long blogs rank higher on the search engine result pages. Your content should be in-depth and well-researched; when you provide an in-detail guide on a topic, topical authority increases. A user researches extensive information which can not be covered in a 300-word blog in most cases.

''A blog post should be well over a minimum of 500-700 words to cover the topic adequately— at least 1,000 words.''-marketinginsidergroup

• Satisfy user intent

Creating 4000 words of content with zero value does not help readers. They will leave your site imminently, and this harms site ranking. You should pick the pain point of searchers. The long blogs should satisfy user intent and consist of actionable solutions.

• Maintain user experience

Your blog post should be readable. Do not put text-heavy content. Use enough space between the lines. If readers can not read congested text, they won't stay anymore. Use paragraphs and subheadings when needed. You can use examples. Don't repeat information in different ways. Get to the point straight.

On-page SEO

White hat strategies for on-page SEO are:

• URLs

Url is the address of your webpage. URL structure should be descriptive and understandable. The search engine can comprehend the URL. So, it should be related to the content of the webpage. You can use keywords in the URL. It helps to optimize your page faster.

We can understand the content of the page from this URL. This makes the work easy for search engines.

• Internal linking

Internal linking means linking another webpage of your website in the content. It can be used as references, data, tools, etc. Using keywords in anchor text as a way to the linked webpage is a good strategy. Internal linking makes the crawling and indexing process easy. When crawlers crawl a webpage, they also consider the content of the linked pages and index relevant pages together. It sends link authority to the linked page which helps to improve ranking.

• Use of keywords

 Creating content on the basics of the keyword does not mean overusing the keyword. Keyword stuffing is considered a black hat technique. Search engines can easily identify these tricks and reduce website ranking as a penalty. So, use keywords very cautiously. Using keywords 500 times in a 1500-word blog is bad practice. Try to use long-tail keywords, as those are less competitive. Use it in the page title, meta description, meta tags, header 1, and a handful of others in the content body. Please don't use it forcefully.

• Image optimization

A human can retain more information from an image than text. To make your content easily understandable, you must use an image. Search engines can not crawl images. They crawl Alt tags to conclude the subject of the given image. When you have a well-optimized keyword-rich alt tag, crawlers can get an idea regarding the whole topic of the content. Image alt tags should be descriptive with a readable name and caption. Even when users search for image results, they can find your image and are naturally directed to your site. In simple words, images should be relevant to your content, and alt tags should represent the topic and what the image is describing.

On-page SEO

• Link building

Link building is a part of off-page SEO, which means promoting your content on other websites. Only creating great content is not enough to rank fast. It would be best if you spread it; only then more people will come to visit.

Link building is hooking your webpage link to others' webpage. That link is called a backlink. It is one of the best off-page SEO strategies. Here are a few tactics through which you can build links to increase your site authority.

• Skyscraper technique

This technique includes the use of the best content that is already ranking. After choosing the right keyword:

1. Find the best-ranking and relevant content targeting the same keyword.
2. Go through it thoroughly.
3. Find out the missing points.
4. Improve it in your way, which must be better than those who are already ranking. When search engines find out that your content is way better than others for the same keyword, you may get a chance to crash them.

• Broken link

Every page has a few broken links. The reason may vary from subject to subject. Find out related pages of your niche. Then, use online free broken link checker tools to find if they have any broken links.

Evaluate the links and try to understand the topic. You can create fresh content to use against these links, or if you already have something to replace the broken links, then reach the website owner.

Let them know that you have quality content to replace the broken link, as keeping a broken link is not good for their site's user experience as well.

• Guest posting

Guest posting is the tactic where you reach out to high authority sites related to your niche and see if they accept your blog on their site. You can use Google to find out who is accepting guest posts in your niche. for that you can use your ''targeted keyword+ guestpost'' query.

In the image, you can see that Digital Success accepts guest posts and has a page regarding this.

Now, please find out more guest blogging sites and submit your content according to their guidelines.

Leave a link to your site, product, or services in the guest post. This way, you can get referral traffic from their website to yours. This is a completely white-hat SEO technique. When a search engine crawls its site, it also counts your content and provides value, which gives you authority and trust and, finally, better rank in SERPs.

Technical SEO

• Page speed

How much time do you give to a website to load its content in 2023? 1 minute? Or less? When Google shows a result in 1 second, the user will not wait for 1 minute. They will instantly leave the site and move to the site ranked after you.

It's about user experience. But apart from that, google makes it a ranking factor.

To test your site's speed, you can use tools like page speed insight. Put your page URL and get the errors. Now, you can fix them and get the desired speed. The site can slow down due to bloated code or larger file size.

• Navigation and mobile friendliness

When you own a fully grown size of 100-150 pages, navigation throughout the site should be simple and smooth. Users must easily navigate from one page to another with 4-5 clicks. It not only improves user experience but also helps crawlers to index interlinked pages. It eventually passes link authority, which provides an extra point for better ranking. Your website should be simple and arranged.

Mobile users are larger in number than PC users. People prefer mobile due to their accessibility. It is handy and easy to use if one has the time to open a PC and connect it to the internet for a quick search.

As mentioned in a Hitwise report (“Hitwise,” n.d.), 58% of Google searches are done from mobile devices-research.com

Most of the searches came from mobile devices. People can use mobile from any place. So, it's important to make your site mobile-friendly. Google is also starting mobile-friendly indexing. It means Google will use mobile versions of websites for indexing. If mobile users are not satisfied with your website, you may lose many customers.

• Fix errors

A website has lots of elements. It is difficult to say in the first instance from which element you are facing a problem in ranking. For this, Google provides a Google search console. There, you can register your site and get every analysis regarding your site.

Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search results.

It verifies that each page of your site is crawlable. Google search console receives alerts when any spam occurs and shows traffic data and links to your site. Also, troubleshoot various issues of your site.

So, you can optimize your site with the help of this tool.

White hat SEO involves:

1. Optimizing websites with a focus on providing high-quality content.
2. Optimizing meta tags and keywords.
3. Improving website structure and navigation.
4. Building authoritative backlinks through genuine outreach efforts.

These practices not only align with search engine guidelines but also enhance the user experience, making websites more useful and valuable to visitors.

By adopting white hat SEO techniques, website owners can establish long-term visibility and credibility in search engine results without the risk of getting penalties or being banned. While white hat SEO may require more effort and patience compared to its black hat counterparts, the benefits are substantial and sustainable, leading to increased organic traffic, higher conversion rates, and improved overall online presence.

Conclusion

Furthermore, white hat SEO is an ever-evolving field, with search engines continuously updating their algorithms to provide better search results. Website owners need to be aware of the updates.

It is not only about ranking on the first page but also about that. White hat SEO provides reputation and trustworthiness to brands. Website owners can achieve long-lasting, sustainable success through it. Investing your time and effort in white hat SEO is a worthy choice.

If you have any suggestions regarding white hat SEO, do let us know in the comment section below.