What is White Hat SEO? Understanding Its Significance and Important Techniques

Google announced several search algorithm updates in 2023, which helped us understand a lot about what type of content gets prioritized by Google. As major search engines have clearly stated tactics like keyword stuffing, link spamming, etc, won’t work any longer. You might be wondering what works now? It’s white hat SEO. Instead of tricking search engine algorithms, you need to focus on creating high-quality content and optimizing your website for a better user experience. Let us diver deeper into the topic to understand white hat SEO, its importance, and effective strategies in detail:

What is White Hat SEO?

White Hat SEO refers to using all the good techniques and strategies that are within Google’s guidelines to appear higher on search engine results. In simple words, it is about the genuine SEO strategies you use to optimize your website content without an aim to trick search engine algorithms. Although white-hat SEO has not always been the preferred method, it has become more significant in recent years. Now, major search engines like Google prioritize user experience. Therefore, high-quality content that is actually helpful for users is prioritized over content created to manipulate search engines.

Difference Between White Hat SEO & Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO is just the opposite of white hat SEO. Black hat SEO refers to using techniques or strategies that are not necessarily within Google’s guidelines to rank higher on search engines. Some common examples of black hat SEO include keyword stuffing, purchasing links, invisible copies, etc. Any tactic that is irrelevant or harmful to the users lies under black hat SEO.

On the other hand, white hat SEO follows good techniques that you follow to improve your search engine rankings while staying within Google’s terms of service. Some common examples of white hat SEO include generating high-quality content, ensuring the site’s mobile-friendliness, optimizing loading times of web pages, etc.

Importance of White Hat SEO

With Google’s continuously improving algorithms that focus on prioritizing good-quality content instead of over-optimized content, white hat SEO is now quite an important aspect to consider for website owners. There was a time when website owners were getting benefits from black-hat SEO techniques and white-hat SEO was extremely slow in driving results. But now, white hat SEO has become more relevant. The following pointers explain in detail the importance of white hat SEO for modern websites:

1. Helps Establish Long-Term Brand

White hat SEO tactics don’t guarantee high search engine rankings, but they do not penalize you either. It’s very similar to how the law works. You don’t necessarily get rewarded for adhering to the laws, but when you break one, you are punished. When you follow black SEO practices, you are inviting potential risks. If search engines discover that you are using black hat SEO, your website will get penalized and may lose most or all of its traffic. While white hat SEO doesn’t guarantee top rankings, you can minimize the risk of getting penalized and establish a long-term reputation by maintaining the integrity of your website.

2. More Cost-Effective

Black hat SEO techniques like building a private blog network or buying expired domains are not just costly but also have no guarantee of working in your favor. But if you invest a good amount of time and effort into white hat SEO practices and work with a strategic approach, it will definitely help you improve your site’s search rankings.

3. Better User Experience

You can also improve the user experience of your website by using white hat SEO techniques. Think of it like this. Suppose you are a user visiting a website that is full of irrelevant content and unnecessary keyword stuffing. Will you stay there? Will you revisit that website? Most probably not. The same thing happens when you use black hat SEO techniques to get your website ranked. You might make it to the top SERP results using black hat SEO tactics (although that’s a rare possibility), but you can’t improve user experience using them and this is what matters the most.

Top White Hat SEO Techniques

Here are some best white hat SEO techniques that you can use to maintain your website’s authoritativeness in the long term and improve its search engine rankings:

1. Do Keyword Research

Finding the right keywords and creating content around them is one of the most important white hat SEO methods. You can use a keyword research tool to identify search terms or phrases that people will use to find your content. These tools will give you a list of thousands or even millions of potential keywords that you can optimize for. But since you have limited resources, you will have to prioritize these keywords based on crucial metrics like TP (Traffic Potential), and KD (Keyword Difficulty). The higher the TP, the better the ranking opportunity. So, you have to look for keywords with high TP and low KD.

2. Create High-Quality Reliable Content

With Google’s search algorithm updates and the helpful content update of September 2023, it is clear that Google prioritizes people-first content. You have to create content for people and not for the search engines. Your content should align with people’s search intent. You must know what people are searching for and why they are searching for a particular query, so that you can structure your content in such a way that it fulfills users’ requirements.

To figure out search intent, you will have to analyze search engine result pages for three Cs, which include content type, content format, and content angle. Content type refers to the type of content that is ranking on search engines. They can be blog posts, landing pages, or anything else. Content format refers to how the content has been structured. It can be in the form of listicles, how-to guides, informative articles, or anything else. Content angle refers to the dominating selling point, like ‘simple,’ ‘easy,’ or something else.

Moreover, make sure that you cover the required topic completely. Include relevant examples, case studies, real-life experiences, or anything else that you find relevant to make the content more valuable and comprehensive for users. The content should be unique and original. You can use already published articles or other resources for research, but write the content entirely in your own words. You can make it unique by adding the opinions of industry experts from your organization.

As per Google’s guidelines, content that demonstrates EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) is more likely to be rewarded. So, get the content reviewed by someone having experience and expertise in the industry before you finally publish it on your website.

3. Focus on On-Page SEO

Along with keyword research, there are several other aspects of on-page SEO that you must focus on. Once you have identified search terms that your target audience is looking for, you have to use relevant keywords in prominent places like titles, headings, meta descriptions, images’ alt text, etc. But as mentioned earlier, make sure not to do keyword stuffing as it is considered a black hat SEO technique. Incorporate keywords in such a way that they do not seem to be forcefully added.

4. Prioritize User Experience

Google itself said that it rewards content that provides a good user experience. While the quality of your content is the foremost factor in determining user experience, there are several other factors that matter. You will have to focus on mobile-friendliness, page loading speed, core web vitals, and data protection policies of your website. Here are some tips to consider:

1. For the protection of users’ data, opt for an SSL certificate, which allows you to use https.
2. Make sure that your core web vitals score is good (LCP, INP, and CLS).
3. Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly.
4. Make sure that your site architecture is good and easy to navigate. You can use schema markup (structured data) and breadcrumbs to ensure this.

5. Build High-Quality Backlinks

While link building is an important Google ranking factor, purchasing links is a black-hat SEO technique. Instead of purchasing links, you should focus on building high-quality organic backlinks. White hat SEO techniques for building quality links include guest blogging, converting non-linked brand mentions into linked ones, and distributing high-quality content and infographics that people share on other platforms. 

What Our Seo Experts Have to Say?

As a top search engine optimization agency, MadHawks has always prioritized quality. We believe in creating high-quality content and optimizing it in such a way that users can find it for relevant search queries, instead of just incorporating keywords to manipular search engines. If you are a website owner and trying to improve your search engine rankings, we recommend focusing on white hat SEO tactics that are listed above. Black hat SEO doesn’t only attract potential risks of getting penalized by Google but also doesn’t guarantee any results. If you are looking for an SEO agency for white hat SEO services, contact MadHawks today!

FAQs

1. What Does White Hat Mean in SEO?

Ans. The term white hat SEO takes inspiration from older films in the Western genre where the good character used to be shown wearing a white hat and the evil character wearing a black hat.

2. What is a good first step toward implementing white hat SEO for my website?

Ans. The first step toward implementing white hat SEO is to improve the quality of your website content and avoid spammy practices like keyword stuffing.

3. Is white hat SEO legal?

Ans. Yes, white hat SEO is what adheres to the guidelines of major search engines like Google. Black hat SEO practices should be avoided.

4. Is white hat SEO effective?

Ans. Yes, white hat SEO practices can be effective if properly implemented. Although white hat SEO doesn’t guarantee results, you can slowly improve the search rankings of your website and eventually improve its authoritativeness.

5. What is gray hat SEO?

Ans. Gray hat SEO is an SEO strategy that combines both white hat and black hat SEO techniques.