Isulong SEOPH: The White Hat Technique

Now Isulong SEOPH marketers, let us discuss White Hat technique. As the name implies… it’s “White”!
Meaning pure, honest intentions, unblemished, etc. etc. etc.. The use
of white hat techniques is what real SEO experts do. This is the
cleanest way of doing search engine optimization and marketing. This is
the “Bible” of the SEO world.

Any search engine positioning tactic that maintains the
integrity of your website and the SERPs (search engine results pages)
is considered a “white-hat” search engine positioning
tactic. These are the only tactics that we will use whenever applicable
and which enhance rather than detract from your website and from the
rankings.

White-Hat Search Engine Positioning Tactics:

Internal Linking

By far one of the easiest ways to stop your website from ranking
well on the search engines is to make it difficult for search engines
to find their way through it. Many sites use some form of script to
enable fancy drop-down navigation, etc. Many of these scripts cannot be
crawled by the search engines resulting in unindexed pages. While many
of these effects add visual appeal to a website, if you are using
scripts or some other form of navigation that will hinder the spidering
of your website it is important to add text links to the bottom of at
least your homepage linking to all you main internal pages including
a sitemap to your internal pages.

Reciprocal Linking

Exchanging links with other webmasters is a good way (not the best,
but good) of attaining additional incoming links to your site. While
the value of reciprocal links has declined a bit over the past year
they certainly still do have their place. A very important note is that
if you do plan on building reciprocal links it is important to make
sure that you do so intelligently. Random reciprocal link building in
which you exchange links with any and virtually all sites that you can
will not help you over the long run. Link only to sites that are
related to yours and who’s content your visitors will be
interested in and preferably which contain the keywords that you want
to target. Building relevancy through association is never a bad thing
unless you’re linking to bad neighborhoods (penalized industries
and/or websites).

If you are planning or currently do undertake reciprocal link
building you know how time consuming this process can be. An useful
tool that can speed up the process is PRProwler. Essentially this tool
allows you to find related sites with high PageRank, weeding out many
of the sites that would simply be a waste of time to even visit. 

Content Creation

Don’t confuse “content creation” with doorway
pages and the such. When we recommend content creation we are
discussing creating quality, unique content that will be of interest to
your visitors and which will add value to your site.  The more
content-rich your site is the more valuable it will appear to the
search engines, your human visitors, and to other webmasters who will
be far more likely to link to your website if they find you to be a
solid resource on their subject.

Creating good content can be very time-consuming, however it will be
well worth the effort in the long run. As an additional bonus, these
new pages can be used to target additional keywords related to the
topic of the page.

Writing For Others

You know more about your business that those around you so why not
let everyone know? Whether it be in the form of articles, forum posts,
or a spotlight piece on someone else’s website, creating content
that other people will want to read and post on their sites is one of
the best ways to build links to your website that don’t require a
reciprocal link back.

Site Optimization

The manipulation of your content, wording, and site structure for
the purpose of attaining high search engine positioning is the backbone
of SEO and the search engine positioning industry. Everything from
creating solid title and meta tags to tweaking the content to maximize
it’s search engine effectiveness is key to any successful
optimization effort.

That said, it is of primary importance that the optimization of a
website not detract from the message and quality of content contained
within the site. There’s no point in driving traffic to a site
that is so poorly worded that it cannot possibly convey the desired
message and which thus, cannot sell. Site optimization must always take
into account the maintenance of the salability and solid message of the
site while maximizing it’s exposure on the search engines.