White Hat SEO is a technique that is used to help search engines crawl your website to help improve your rankings of the website or a web page. White hat techniques are considered good practice to achieve high rankings on search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. There is also black hat SEO which is the opposite of white hat SEO (makes sense, right?).
Black hat SEO involves deception and tricking search engines to gain higher rankings. Black hat SEO goes against guidelines and if you are found doing it, you can get penalized. Getting penalized is not where you want to be; don’t get yourself in that position.
Learn about some white hat SEO that you can incorporate to your website can help get your rankings higher. Maybe you do your best to gain the golden position of being the first site on search engines!
1. Use descriptive meta tags
Meta tags is within your HTML document. There are three categories within meta tags (1) meta title, (2) meta keywords, (3) meta descriptions. The function of these is so search engines can locate your website if someone were searching for relevant information. The meta title and meta descriptions are displayed on search engine listings once a term is searched. As for meta keywords, they are becoming a thing of the past because many people began doing keyword stuffing to it; which search engines do not like. The most effective meta titles are about 10-70 characters long including space. To gain effectiveness in meta descriptions make sure it is around 70-160 characters. Your meta descriptions should be concise and contain your best keywords. Best technique is to make sure each page on your website has its’ own unique meta tags.
2. Use effective keywords within each page of your website
One of the most effective ways to gain higher rankings is to use keywords that are relevant to your website. Keyword research is a must during the process of choosing the best keywords to put within your content. If you have a website that sells dog walking services, you wouldn’t want to have cat walking (yes, that is real) within your content. That wouldn’t help you one bit. Using keywords such as dog walking services, dog walker, dog walking company are better keywords to put within content. But there is an unwritten rule that you should know about. While you are putting effective keywords in content, you shouldn’t write a sentence that has too many keywords. For example, “We are a dog walking company that walks dogs because we are dog walkers walking dogs.” That will be considered keyword stuffing and can get you penalized. Make sure you know what keyword density is and try stick to a certain percentage. But most importantly, make sure someone coming to your website understands your content and make sense to a visitor.
3. Utilize the “Alt text” for images
Alt text have two functions. They help search engines crawl each image and helps users understand what the image will be if it does not fully load correctly. Search engines don’t physically see the images like we do so adding alt text let’s search engine distinguish what it is. Make sure you keep alt text concise and easy to understand for both search engines and visitors. This can help your image show up in Google and other search engine image results.
4. Provide unique content
No matter the services or products you are providing, one of the most crucial aspects of SEO in content. Having unique content gives search engines one way to boost your rankings and adds value to user experience. Best way is to add original content to your website. Make sure that it is well structured and makes sense to a user. Search engines dislike duplicate content because it has troubles figuring out how it should rank one site over another that has the exact same content. Why would you even want to copy someone else’s content? Don’t you want to stand out from the crowd. Having unique content just seems like a win-win situation.
5. Quality link building
Link building is becoming one of the best ways to ranking high and staying there. Having good links built from quality sites are very important to gaining traffic and credibility for search engines. Make sure you avoid low-quality and spammy sites. These can do the opposite and actually hurt your rankings. Each business will vary on their link building strategy and you will have to make sure you pay attention to all of the links that are directing to your website. I look at link building as a resume for your website. The better quality and more relevant it is, the more trust search engines will have to rank your website higher for visitors to notice.
6. Optimize your page upload speed
An underrated factor to help rank your website is your page upload speed. This speaks for itself; the faster your website can load, the better. Search engines are taking this into consideration to ranking quicker sites but it also helps visitors too. Some ways to help make your page upload speed higher are compressing images or looking into your servers. Moz does a wonderful job listing 15 tips to speed up your website. Make sure you check out their article to help speed up your site. Who likes to visit a website and it takes a whole day to load? No one does! There are multiple ways to test the speed of your site. One way that I look at upload speeds of websites is through Google’s PageSpeed Insights. This tool has plenty of useful features such as telling a speeding rating on a 0-100 scale, 100 being the best. It will also give you recommendations on what you can do to help speed your site.
7. Internal linking to related content on your website
Having links to other related pages on your website to give visitors more information helps an individual know more about your company and helps sustain the time they visit your website. Optimizing these links by using related keywords as the link can help SEO because it helps search engine to identify your content.
Conclusion
These are just a few ways to help rank a website. We are barely breaking the surface on white hat techniques to use for your SEO. Make sure you become aware of a majority of them and the changing ranking factors. As search engines get smarter, these ranking factor can change overtime. One technique that helped rankings can begin to mean nothing in time. SEO is always evolving and SEO’ers like myself always have to keep on our toes to stay ahead of it all.
