The WhiteHat SEO School of Thought

White Hat SEO Tips and Techniques

1. Acquire Backlinks from Reputable Websites

   This action will provide a bigger SEO boost than any other technique a webmaster can employ. The key factor to remember though is quality over quantity. For example one backlink from nytimes.com is 100 times more valuable than 10 backlinks from numerous PageRank 1 websites. On the other hand some webmasters opt to acquire backlinks by using link farms, a BlackHat SEO tactic. The ranking boost offered from such methods is only temporary and always fail in the long run as the Google team discovers them and bans the respective sites from the service.

2. Create and XML Sitemap

   An XML Sitemap is like Table of Contents for a website. The sitemap list all the most important webpages present on given domain (in any order). This list is made up in a computer language made for search engines to understand. When a webmaster submits his URLs in the form of a sitemap it is almost guaranteed that all the URLs on a given domain will be indexed and thus made findable in SERP.

3. Create search engine friendly URLs

   
   Search engines like to remember URLs that are also memorable to real people. The best URLs are those that look like standard speech. For example: SEOknow.org/white-hat-SEO is a URL that is easier to remember and retype than SEOknow.org/white%20hat%20SEO.xphp. The former URL with rank better in SERPs because it is more likely to be clicked in result pages than the convoluted URL in the later example.

4. Create original content

   This one seems overused in SEO tips but its advice is still underutilized. Content farming, content skimming or content repurposing only to SEO it before trying to pass it off as your own is Black Hat SEO 101. Don't do that. Plagiarizing content is highly unethical and is frowned upon just as much in the internet search engine world as it is in real life.

5. Strategically Insert Keywords

   Peg keywords in the URLs, the title tags, the heading tags and throughout the body. Placing keywords about your webpage is a legitimate WhiteHat SEO technique. Conversely BlackHat keyword techniques would include keyword stuffing (keywords accounting for more than 5%-7% of body) or using invisible text (displaying keywords to web crawlers but hiding it from users by using text that is the same color as the background). As long as you don't overdo it, this is a must WhiteHat SEO trick.