White Hat SEO Strategies You Need To Implement

White hat SEO is using ethical engine optimization strategies, techniques, and best practices that are acceptable by the search engines. It doesn't violate the search engine guidelines. Instead, it helps search engines to better understand a website by improving relevancy, crawlability, site structure and overall technical infrastructure of a website.

White hat SEO is done with the search engines but not against them. It doesn't try to take advantage of search engines to rank a website.

Remember, your goal is not optimizing for the search engines. You need to optimize for the real human audience, and let the remaining job to the search engines.

If your site offers high-quality and relevant content with great user experience, organics rankings will come by itself naturally.

The number one goal of Google is to provide users the most relevant information. Google decides which result is the most relevant by using its algorithm. More specifically, bu utilizing the sets of rules in its algorithm.

If you want to practice white hat SEO, your primary goal should be providing the most relevant information with the best user experience possible. If you can achieve only this goal by itself, you have already practiced than 90% of white hat SEO.

Definitely search engine algorithms are not perfect. They have their own flaws. You may have built the best website but still cannot get organic rankings you want. Google needs time to understand your site and implement user testing on it. However, if you have built a really solid site you will succeed.

People will read content on your site, share it on social media and link to it. It is the only sustainable way of ranking a website. Once you do the right things, you will eventually reap the rewards you want sooner or later.

If you choose to take advantage of Google, you may see a short term success.

Google spends billions of dollars every year to improve its algorithm. If you think you can beat that by focusing on its weaknesses you should be out of mind.

Google will eventually find out that you try to game its system. Then you will be placed in a SERP position you don't want to be. You may be removed from SERP altogether if you did really bad things.

Therefore, you should pursue only white hat SEO practices that are %100 safe to use. I have made a list that includes the best ones (the most effective and worth your time).

1. Create uniquely valuable content

SEO starts on the page. A lot of people looking for the “SEO tricks” while content on their site sucks. Not all the Content is King. Only the content that has the following features is uniquely valuable.

1.1 Unique

Unique content is the one that is not published somewhere else before. When I say “unique”, I don't mean the content that passes Copyscape. If you rewrite an earlier published content without providing no additional value that content is not unique.

In the past, people used spun articles and worked well. Spin someone else's content, make minor modifications on it then publish. That could be well enough to make search engines believe you have unique content.

Nowadays, search engines are more sophisticated. They read your article and interpret it semantically to decide if your content is discussing points that are not really discussed earlier.

If you outsource your content, and your writer grabs a few sentences from the each page on SERP randomly to rewrite, you cannot expect good rankings. You can definitely utilize earlier published content, but you have to bring value to the web if you want your content is perceived as unique content.

If you plan outsourcing content use a top-notch platform like Content Development Pros since they have in house writers and all Americans.

1.2 Relevant

Nowadays, everyone is obsessed with the word count. They say I need this much of content that word long. Although that is fine, very few people understand the actual value of relevance.

If your content doesn't answer the question the user is looking for it is junk. I did this mistake quite a lot in the past. I have written really long copies but only a small part on the pages was discussing what it should be discussed. It is too easy to get lost in the details forgetting the main idea of the content.

I would highly to create a content structure before even you start writing anything. You need to know what titles and subtitles you will cover before you start to write a paragraph.

I have created this page with this logic. I have laid all the titles H1, H2, H3, H4 on the blank page before I write any paragraph. Although this advice seems very basic and logical, you can't believe how many people are writing content without knowing what they will cover.

1.3 Comprehensive

Times to rank on Google with a 500-word content is gone. When everyone was creating a short piece of content, you could do the same and still earn a competitive position on the SERP.

Nowadays, in most niches average length of content more than 1500 words. But once again, comprehensive content is not necessarily very long content. It is the type of content that covers a topic from very different angles and in-depth. To achieve that goal, comprehensive content gets naturally longer.

However, there is no rule that more text on a page will result in comprehensive content. What makes the difference is what is discussed on that page, and how much value that content offers compared to other pieces of content on the same topic.

1.2 Provides response immediately

This one is most site owners are missing. Take a look at the first paragraph of this page. I have started making a detailed definition of White hat SEO. I have tried to write the most useful description writing the shortest amount of text possible.

You should aim the same for a few reasons. Google doesn't want you to hide the response to what the user is looking for in the last paragraph of a page. Although you may have the answer the user is searching for, you need to provide it immediately.

Many SEOs keep their answer to the end in an effort to hold the visitor on-page. However, this makes more harm than good for SEO.

1.3 Easy To Understand

You may be writing a piece of content that offers very valuable information. However, if your content doesn't communicate well with the reader, you will fail in SEO and content marketing.

At all times, your content should be readable. You can learn the readability level of your content using various tools. Also by having a quick look at your copy you can tell if it is readable or not.

I would recommend checking out:

My best strategies to improve the readability of your content immediately.

1.4 Authentic

Authenticity is being different than others in a unique way. Your content should offer a unique value no other content on the web offers.

I cannot tell you how you could differentiate your content from other people on the web. You need to find the points make your content authentic by yourself. But I can give you an example showing how it can be done.

If you have a website discussing grocery shopping, you can contact the managers of the grocery stores to ask a few specific questions. Then you can include this information in your content as expert advice.

Do the things only a few people would spend time and effort to do the same.

You can also use my tips to improve your content marketing to the next level.

2. Make your site easy to navigate

Make your site very easy to navigate for the users and the search engines. Let me explain what do I mean more specifically.

2.1 Use Breadcrumbs

Visitors land on a random page on your site should know where they are located. They should know what is the depth of their position in your site architecture.

You can achieve it using breadcrumbs. If a user wants to go a higher or lower page in your page hierarchy, he should do it with a single click.

This will improve user engagement, time spent on the website and SEO rankings.

2.2 Use a Silo Structure

Benefit from a silo structure. Organize your core content to link to secondary pages on your website. These pages are focused on discussing a more specific point mentioned in your core content.

A silo structure will improve user experience, pass PageRank to internal pages and help search engines to better crawl your website.

2.3 Build Home Page Strategically

Build your home page strategically. Organize it as a map that can dispatch the visitors from there where they want to navigate.

3. Use Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords

Including LSI keywords to our content is a wonderful way to boost our SEO rankings. These words are synonyms of the words we use in our content. Take “apple” for instance.

By typing that keyword, you're likely to get search results and suggestions related to the mac and iPhone. LSI keywords help search engines what about our website content is.

We should be careful not to do any keyword stuffing. We want our keywords to be used in our content naturally with a context.

4. Improve your site performance

We want to provide the smoothest user experience possible for our visitors. The bread and butter of good user experience is a fast site that loads fast both on mobile and desktop devices. Here are things to do to increase your site speed immediately.

5. Use visual multimedia

Using the optimum amount of engaging multimedia (photos, videos audio podcasts) increases user experience (UX). As a result, the time spent on our website prolongs. Time spent on site is a primary Google ranking factor that we should definitely strategize our SEO accordingly.

6. Use descriptive meta titles and URL slugs.

The meta title is a very important part of any SEO campaign. It needs to be optimized with our keywords. We should be using descriptive meta titles that are interesting for the people. In this way, we make our website like a magnet that entices people to click our website.

A slug is the component of a URL describes the content of the page. It is a good practice to include target keywords in the slug.

7. Get Rid Of Zombie Pages

Zombie pages are those which provide no value for the website visitors. These pages have usually low-quality or duplicate content or very old press releases.

Zombie pages can lower your overall SEO if they are too many on your website.

8. Publish Longer Content

If there is one white hat SEO technique that works very well is publishing a longer piece of content. Search engines like in-depth, well-researched content over shorter content.

People tend to engage more with the longer form of content if is structured properly. Needless to say, longer content includes more aspects of the subject, and more detailed in its nature.

9. Use Rich Snippets

Rich snippets are the direct answers Google suggests to us in SERP. Rich Snippets will generate more clicks since the number of rich snippets shown in search results is doubled in recent years. Structured Data Mark-up which lets webmasters improve their SERP status will definitely be more important in the future.

10. Use AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

Having AMP websites provides faster loading on all mobile devices. Google prioritizes those sites to list in search results. Accelerated Mobile Pages are fully supported in Google Search console. With the mobile-first index update, mobile device SEO optimization will grow at a much faster rate.

11. Avoid Penalties

Google Not Only Penalizes Websites. Once a violation detected, Google usually penalizes a series of IP addresses hosted on the same server. That is why I strongly recommend having your own IP with your Webhosting.

I also believe that Google penalizes the domain owner which violates its terms of services by placing him/her on a blacklist. I don't have tangible proof for this claim. There are hints that Google gives us penalizing people if they are obviously against the rules.

But, what makes me think so? Let me explain what it is.

If you are using Google Adwords and violating their advertising policy your advertising account gets suspended.

Do you really think the only thing suspended is the advertising account?

Of course no! They usually send an email explaining all other accounts in a relationship this specific account is also suspended.

Ok, you can go ahead and create another Gmail account to start advertising on Adwords again.

Unfortunately, this is not possible to do. In the email they send, they warn people not to create additional Gmail accounts since they will be banned as well.

Hence, they don't penalize accounts or websites, but rather people who are doing the things Google doesn't like.

People used black hat techniques and left quite enough footprints for Google to find out maybe in Google's blacklist as well.

I advise everyone not risking his/her reputation with a lifetime ban by Google. There is almost no way to remove a name from Google's blacklist, once it is labeled as a spammer or black hat guy.

Also, why to risk while there are legitimate ways of doing SEO without worrying if the next Google algorithmic update will tank your traffic.

I recommend everyone checking out Google's Webmaster resources to educate themselves about Google white hat SEO practices.