Doing SEO The Right Way: A Quick Guide On White Hat SEO

Every business knows they need to leverage SEO and SEO services to get potential customers to find them online. However, if they are not careful in how they achieve their SEO goals, they could risk being penalised by search engines or, worse, outright banned from showing up in search results. Avoiding such setbacks that can derail your goals requires adhering to what is known as white hat SEO.

What Is White Hat SEO and Why Is It Important?

White hat SEO covers all the approved best practices that increase a website’s ranking in a search engine’s results page, which means they only apply to the sites listed in the organic results and not to paid or sponsored links and ads. The techniques under this SEO approach adhere to the terms established by the most popular search engines used today, such as Google, DuckDuckGo, and Bing, and are a stark contrast to their counterparts in black hat SEO, which rely on unethical and deceptive methods.

Doing SEO this way or in other words the right way, is important because SERPs would be chaotic without it. A lack of rules or guidelines would affect both users and website owners, with the former having to comb through irrelevant sites just to find what they are looking for, while the latter is forced to fall back on outdated SEO practices just to rank on search results. As you can see, the experience becomes much worse for everyone.

White hat SEO prevents all this as website owners have much clearer guidelines on ranking their site, as per the recommendation of search engines like Google, who continuously ensure they only show websites and content relevant to their users’ search intent. Consequently, this allows users to easily find exactly what they want through organic search.

Differentiating Between White Hat and Black Hat SEO

Gaining a better understanding of white hat SEO requires examining its counterpart, black hat SEO, and their key differences in several aspects, such as:

1. Content

White hat SEO aims to create quality content optimised with search intent in mind. In contrast, black hat SEO settles for duplicated or low-quality content that is only optimised for Google and other search engines.

2. Keywords

White hat SEO leverages organic keyword research for every page. On the other hand, black hat SEO chooses one or several target keywords and overuses them in meta tags, headers, or unnatural anchor texts throughout the content.

3. Link building

White hat SEO builds links via authentic link-building techniques and guest posting in compliance with a particular search engine’s guidelines. Black hat SEO will typically go the easy route by buying backlinks.

Black hat SEO is not necessarily insidious as it shares many parallels with white hat SEO, with the only difference being that its techniques are designed to cater to search engines instead of users, which, as you may recall, does not align with the ultimate goal shared by Google and other search engines.

And while black hat SEO does improve search engine visibility, its effects are largely temporary as search engines will eventually recognise its harmful practices and penalise the websites using them, either by deranking their website or blacklisting it from their search results. Deranking will naturally reduce a site’s reputation, traffic, and sales while getting blacklisted is a deep hole that can be incredibly difficult to climb out of. Hence, it is best to play it safe and build your website using sustainable strategies that guarantee long-term results.

Is White Hat SEO Right For You?

Not every business should always use white hat SEO as other factors, such as their niche and industry, may necessitate black hat SEO. For instance, organisations that belong to industries that are themselves black hat will naturally use similar tactics that align with their business model alongside white hat SEO to stay competitive in their respective markets. This combined white hat and black hat SEO approach is often called a grey hat strategy.

Conclusion

SEO has now become an indispensable part of every business’s digital marketing strategy, and if you are interested in increasing your search traffic and ranking signals the right way, playing by the rules via white hat SEO is the most effective means to achieve your goals and build an enduring web presence without risk.