The good guys wear the white hats. And the bad guys get left laying in the dust along with their funky black hats.

Maybe you’ve heard of it … White Hat SEO as opposed to Black Hat SEO practices. You probably figured out by now that the terminology is ultimately stolen from the western movie genre.

White Hat is what a hero in a western film was called while the villain was known as the Black Hat. The Lone Ranger is a classic example of a White Hat. Now, you should be able to easily identify who the bad guys are and who the good guy is in the following Once Upon a Time in the West clip.

Westerns are fun, but watching them won’t get your site a top ranking in Google. Proper SEO techniques, on the other hand, will. Practicing the ways of the Black Hat will get you thrown into the virtual Crowbar Hotel. (That’s jail for those not down with the western lingo.)

The Basics

White Hat – search engine optimization techniques that focus on relevancy of content for the end user and adhere to search engine rules and polices used to obtain an advantageous organic ranking.

Check Webopedia for another more lengthy definition.

Black Hat – aggressive search engine tactics that focus solely on search engine and not the end user. Short term returns are often the goal and not long term development of the website. Sites can be banned from search engine results.

Webopedia’s definition is here.

With White Hat there is really no risk for a website. The idea is to create a really well done site that serves the end user’s needs first and foremost. Black Hat or spamdexing as it is called sometimes is only about the owner of the website and what they can gain.

The Techniques

Getting the most out of your search engine ranking involves following the rules. Using the best practices for SEO will help a website rank higher more quickly. So, what are the rules to follow? We’ll cover some of the best things to do to optimize your site. Keep in mind, this is not exhaustive.

What SHOULD be done:

1. On Page Optimization
   1. Head Tags including Title, Description and Keywords
   2. Heading Tags – <h1>, <h2>, etc.
   3. Content Length – Best: 800+ Good: 450+ Poor: Less than 250
   4. Alt Tags – use these to effectively describe images
2. Site Wide Optimization
   1. Sitemap – an XML and HTML version is preferred
   2. Text Navigation – to insure the search engine spiders can read them
   3. Robots.txt File – helps spiders index website
   4. Privacy Statement – it’s a good practice to have on the site

What should NOT be done:

1. Unrelated Keywords – i.e. Mickey Mouse loves hims some Johnny Be Good Hamburgers.
2. Keyword Stuffing – overusing a keyword throughout the text so that it is unreadable.
3. Hidden Text – coloring the text so that it blends into the background. Very easy to identify for the spiders.
4. Link Farms – linking to a group of low quality sites that interlink to one another.
5. Blog Spamming – software that will generate keyword phrases that are otherwise unintelligible.

This list could go one from here, but this give a good idea of what to avoid. Generally speaking creating a White Hat site should be fairly natural. It will take hard work. Sometimes the Black Hat techniques are just as much work. All that effort should be channeled into creating a site that helps others.

White Hat SEO practices will take time. Long term results are the focus. If a website is being built for long term purposes, it should be done organically. Organic in the sense that the site, content, linking, etc should grow naturally over time.

Stay away from Black Hat techniques. You do not want to be the bad guy. The good guys always win.

Search Engine Optimization … king of the world wide web. How did it get so high and mighty? To get right to the point, great content has always been important and essentially that is what SEO comes down to. Now that begs the question, “What is great content?” Before we make that journey together I will explain the nitty gritty on SEO. To that end: when a website is properly optimized for search engines, it will attain a high ranking for the keywords that have been targeted. More often that not people are searching for products and services are using Google. As of March 2013, Google enjoys 86.3% of the search engine traffic in the United States as well as 88.8% of the global traffic according to a karmasnack report that cites Compete, Nielsen-Net, Alexa, seoMoz, StatsCounter – GlobalStats as well as their own data. So, when I mention ranking in search engines I mean Google. Google makes the rules. So, it’s in our good interest to adhere to them. In reality, Google’s goal is to serve the best possible result to the searcher. As website owners, our goal should be the same.

What are the Rules of SEO?

Google has a 43 page document called Search Quality Rating Guidelines that they’ve finally released to the public. In the past it was being leaked. Now it is freely available for you to read any time. You certainly will have a good grasp of what Google is looking for after reading it. If for some reason you are not in the mood for a 43 pager, I’ll fill you in.

1. Provide useful information.
2. Get real backlinks from relevant websites.
3. Don’t try to trick anybody.

Let’s continue our journey of knowledge about these three areas of SEO. Learning is FUN! Now back to our regularly scheduled programming…

The Magic of Content

Provide useful information. Content is where the magic happens. Start with developing thorough information that will help the person who visits your website. There is no one way to create great articles, posts, blogs, etc. Here are some ideas to consider:

• Educational – break out all the data and references and turn the post into exhaustive research
• Humorous – have a lighthearted approach to information to keep readers engaged
• Videos – use someone else’s or better yet create your own
• Lists – “Top 25 articles about SEO” or something … everyone loves these
• Reviews – give a useful review on a product or service

Let your personality come out in your writing. If you can’t write, hire someone who can. There are plenty of candidates. I can think of one right now. Starts with a “R” and ends with an “owde.”

Behind the Scenes with Backlinks

Get real backlinks from relevant websites. Backlinks are incoming or inbound links from other websites to your website. Another way to think about it, is a vote. If you have a sports blog and you get a “vote” or link from ESPN to your site, the search engine will like that. Google updates the search algorithm occasionally to better serve it’s users. The art of building backlinks has evolved along with the changes in the search algorithm. In the past some webmasters fell into the trap of quantity over quality. This lead to unscrupulous spam linking practices that Google is not interested in. An authoritative website, such as ESPN, will carry much more backlink weight than Sammy’s Slammin’ Sports Blog. Don’t get me wrong. Lots of links are good … if they are quality ones. The more relevant they are the better for your website ranking.

Trick No Treat

Don’t try to trick anybody. There’s been a whole lotta trickin’ goin’ on when it comes to the seedy underworld of SEO. These practices are what we would call Black Hat. Being involved in black hat SEO will run this risk of getting Google-slapped. No, Sergey Brin will not come to your house and slap you across the face. Your website will be removed from the search engine results. We already talked a little bit about no-nos for backlinks. Don’t buy 100,000 .ru links from someone for 5 bucks. Here are a few more black hat ways to avoid. What not to do:

• Hidden text or links – they’re not really hidden
• Keyword stuffing – the process of unnaturally using a keyword over and over again in content
• Sneaky redirects – making a link look like it’s going one place when it is really going somewhere else
• Cloaking – showing a different page to the user than the one the search engine sees

There is no way you should be trying some of these. Google likes to ask it’s team that manually checks websites for content, “Would you send your grandmother to this website?” We should all unashamedly be able to send our Grannys to our sites. And we should avoid any garish colors or flashing, blinking elements to avoid giving Grams a seizure. White hat is the way to go. White hats are for good guys doing it the right way.

That About Wraps It Up

What did we learn here today? Hopefully I imparted some helpful wisdom. SEO is a big deal. It should be done correctly and always with the end user in mind. And that, my friends, means creating some killer content. If you’re going to do it, might as well do it right.