White Hat SEO

White hat SEO is any practice or tactic that seeks to improve a website’s search rankings on a search engine results page (SERP). It does this while maintaining the overall integrity of a website because it does not breach a search engine’s terms of use. Put simply, white hat SEO is not black hat SEO. A white hat SEO agency knows how to rank without breaking Google’s rules.

There’s no complete consensus as to where the name white hat came from, but it’s speculated that it stems from old Western flicks, where the ‘good guy’ would wear a white hat.

Most reputable digital marketing agencies will use white hat SEO techniques to help their clients grow their brands and raise their SERP rankings. Usually, a white hat SEO agency will use strategies that involve creating content that is considered valuable and helpful, optimizing user experience across a site, and earning backlinks with other healthy, white hat websites.

The places that white hat and white hat differ can be broken down into how they’re used in different aspects of digital marketing. A white hat SEO agency will use white hat SEO tactics, and black hat agencies will use black hat tactics. 

Producing quality content 

The best way to please Google’s algorithm is to generate content that is helpful to the user, providing them with a value they could not get anywhere else. A white hat SEO agency will emphasize finding out what their target audience wants to know, and addressing that in an original, well-thought, well-written way.

Black hat SEO strategies are usually about quantity over quality. Low-quality, duplicate content that is heavily templated for easy copy-and-pasting is a signature of black hat SEO. This content is often not entirely focused on what the website’s audience would be looking for, and focuses instead on just getting something posted.

Keyword research and usage 

A white hat SEO agency will use strategies that usually involve the usage of keywords in carefully plotted intervals, where the keyword comes up organically. An average reader would not likely be able to know what a blog post’s target keyword was at a casual read. 

Black hat SEO is the birthplace of keyword stuffing. These strategies involve overusing the keyword in headings, the title, and in ways that feel unnatural and forced in content. Another black hat technique that dates back to the early days of the net is to ‘hide’ keywords, by spamming them over and over in a font that’s the same color as the blog’s background. 

Link Building 

White hat and black hat link building are topics all on their own, but at a brief glance, a white hat SEO agency will create authentic backlinks with high-value, relevant websites. It’s a time-consuming process, but it’s worth the effort.

Black hat link building involves buying backlinks that lead to any site on the web, regardless of what the actual content and authority of that site involves. In fact, entire sites are built just for the purpose of black hat link building.

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