White Hat SEO can be defined as the good and acceptable forms of web design, construction and marketing that are employed to make a site found by both people and search engines. White hat SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the use of legitimate SEO techniques that are agreeable and encouraged by search engines. These are considered best practice methods of getting your website to rank higher.

These are designed to maintain the quality and relevance of the search results people searching end up with. These include the proper use of meta-tags, reasonable keyword saturation and friendly page design and web design. Generally, if you are doing everything honestly and ethically, you will be doing White Hat SEO, although how well you are doing it is down to the skill of the SEO specialist.

Think of how you like to be treated. You do not like to be tricked, manipulated, lied to or deceived. White hat is about being honest and ethical. The biggest reason for doing it this way is you can not get in trouble by the search engines (i.e. think negative indexing or worst still, banned by the search engine/s).

White hats produce results that last a long time, black hat sites will eventually be banned once the search engines discover what they are doing – it is only a matter of time. An SEO tactic, technique or method is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines’ guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.

White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to game the algorithm. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical.

Search engines may penalise sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines’ algorithms, or by a manual site review. One infamous example was the February 2006 Google removal of BMW Germany. BMW quickly said sorry, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google’s list. BMW have a lot of resources to be able to sort the aftermath out later… most medium and small businesses do not have such luxuries. Fair warning…

Spiderspun only do White hat SEO, the results are long lasting, properly done and thorough. To find out what white hat seo we can do for you goto our contact page and get in touch.