No, it’s not just about making a fashion statement (and you certainly wouldn’t win any awards with a white hat anyway). In SEO, and most digital marketing in general, you have two options to choose from: white hat or black hat. If you’re working with honest, high-quality marketeers, then they’ll use the right tactics to ensure your website continues to work for you and doesn’t put your business at risk; these are your white hat SEOs. However, if they employ dangerous, potentially damaging SEO tactics, that can be detrimental to your site’s authenticity and ranking abilities, then these are your cowboy black hatters, who should be avoided at all costs.
Industry standards are loose in the digital marketing world. Think about how many businesses you know that must have bought social media followers, worked with spammy affiliate link companies, and taken a customer’s data without permission. It’s a lot - and without industry standards in place, unfortunately these tactics continue to drive traffic (often low-quality and low-converting).
Google and other search engines have created their own search algorithms that help website owners know what they need to do to ensure their websites are optimised for these algorithms, whether that’s through quality content, the relevance of the webpage, how user-friendly they are, and page speed.
What exactly should you look out for when it comes to managing your SEO agency or consultant effectively? Educating yourself on the right tactics they should be employing is a great start, ensuring that whatever methodology they have planned out for the coming months, gives your website the level of care it needs to help bring in new business.
What is White Hat SEO?
So, what exactly is white hat SEO? It’s the art (but not magic) of ensuring your website has quality content, relevant meta data (page titles and descriptions), and great site navigation to ensure that visitors to the site can easily find what they need, as well as using your website as a reference point in the future.
Although we mentioned that there aren’t many industry standards in digital marketing, there are guidelines that Google, Bing, and other search engines follow, to ensure that websites are given a fair chance of becoming more visible. These are effectively your ‘white hat’ SEO tactics.
White Hat SEO guidelines
If you’re familiar with SEO, you’ll know that it can take a long time for a website to be fully optimised i.e. actually becoming visible within the search engine results pages (SERPs). But with patience and persistence, your website will become a beacon for your customers, old and new, ensuring that you’re a quality resource, and always put the person before the search engine.
So, what tactics should you be employing to follow Google’s guidelines, as well as optimising for the user, and not for the machine?
1. High quality, engaging content
Number one on our list is ensuring that every single page of your website, that a user could land on and a search engine should crawl, needs to include high quality content, which is relevant to your business, and give the user information that they need. This content should come in the form of optimised images and enlightening copy, as well as being easy to digest.
2. Page speed
We’re all accustomed to that frustration you experience when you land on a website or blog article that won’t load properly or even at all. In today’s fast-paced world, we want everything yesterday, so it’s vital that your website has quick load times. This means visitors to your site i.e. potential customers, don’t give up and go looking elsewhere…
3. Solid site structure
An easy to navigate site structure makes finding answers on your site straightforward for users, as well as ensuring search engine robots can crawl and index your pages effectively, without missing any important information. Constantly reviewing and addressing this site structure keeps it up to date and informs search engines of any pages they should be ignoring (no indexing).
4. High quality backlinks
We keep using the term ‘high-quality’, but we can’t stress it enough. Google, and other search engines, lap up high-quality content, technical SEO, site speed, and backlinks like there’s no tomorrow. High quality content not only works for the user, but also helps attract those vital backlinks your site needs to increase in authority. The better your content and the more questions you help answer, the more likely other sites will link back to you to back-up their own blog articles and use you as the voice of authority. It’s a win-win for both your users and your site.
What is Black Hat SEO?
Now you know what you should be doing to keep your website in check, it’s time to take a look at the other end of the SEO scale, those black hat and grey hat tactics, which might be tempting at first to drive vast amounts of traffic and make it look like things are going smoothly, but will ultimately cause damage to your reputation and potentially penalties for your website.
What are the main differences?
With white hat and proper SEO tactics, by following Google’s guidelines, the user is at the forefront of your mind and you’re creating your website to work for a human, rather than just the search engine robot. However, black hat SEO tactics focus on computers and the bots, pushing numbers and figures up, but ultimately providing no value at all to the user. This can lead to high traffic levels, but low engagement figures, high bounce rates, and non-existent conversions. Simply point, it’s all the show, but no outcome.
Strangely, the tactics for white hat SEO and black hat SEO, on the surface, don’t seem that different. You need to create content to draw users and the search engine bots in, you need to drive backlinks to the website so the crawlers can see the authority of the site, and your site needs to be technically sound.
The difference between white hat and black hat with all these tactics, however, is that black hatters optimise the site for the robots, ignoring the end users, and attempting to employ as many quick fixers and dodgy shortcuts as possible. Let’s take a look at these tactics below.
Main Black Hat tactics to avoid
The names might not mean much to you, but the tactics will, so ensure you’re clued up on some of the following practices, so that you don’t get penalised:
Cloaking and hidden text
This is a long-used method by dodgy black hatters. It’s the practice of placing extra content (mainly irrelevant keywords and useless copy) onto pages across the website, whether by using white text on a white background, so only the robot can see it and not the user, or by hiding links or text in the HTML, or by using a really tiny font. Luckily, search engine robots are becoming more and more sophisticated, so can generally spot this black hat tactics a mile off.
Keyword stuffing
Gone are the days of littering a web page, blog article, or page title with as many keywords (relevant or not) as you can muster. Yes, keywords are still necessary for the success of your website, but it’s all about the quality of the content you’re creating around those keywords, not just stuffing them throughout your site and hoping for the best.
This goes for unrelated keywords too. It’s tempting to target the highest performing, high traffic driving terms, but often there are many sites already ranking for these keywords. Look at long-tail, low hanging fruit, and optimise around that. If you’re being advised to include as many keywords and terms and possible in your content, then readdressing your SEO strategy is the way forward.
Comment spam
You may have already noticed spammy, irrelevant comments on articles you publish via your site. Ensure your SEO company aren’t doing the same on other websites, attempting to gain backlink authority. It’s an extremely outdated and dangerous black hat tactic that will mean you’re putting yourself at risk of a penalty. Good, white hat SEO companies will know how to stop spammy comments affecting your site’s authority, as well as never spamming other websites either.
Duplicate content
Duplicate content is a lazy way of taking someone else’s work and using it as your own. Also known as content scraping, some websites will simply copy and paste great content that’s been produced and publish it as their own. Not only is this dangerous for their own website, it can also put the original content producer at risk too.
Duplicate content can exist without copy and pasting from other sites. If you simply put the same meta description or same copy across every web page, Google and other search engines will pick up on this and ultimately penalise your site.
Following search engine guidelines and being up to date on your algorithm knowledge is a sure-fire way to ensure that your site is performing as well as it should be, which is why ongoing, white hat SEO is so important to the success of your website. Regular health checks and reviews will discover if you need to improve site speed, add more quality content, or revise your meta data. The main difference between white hat and black hat tactics are that white hat SEO takes time and patience to ensure you’re getting the results you need and aren’t at risk of an algorithmic or manual penalty from the search engines. White hat SEO follows the appropriate guidelines set out and always thinks of the user first, before the search engine.