White Hat Techniques for SEO Best Practice - Digitaltims

How do you get your website to rank on SERP without fear of being penalized?

The answer is simple - performing White hat techniques for SEO.

Search engines especially Google takes user friendliness very seriously and thus they regularly update their search algorithms to ensure they provide the best results to users queries.

The algorithms don’t just provide the best result for users query, they are also used to clamp down on websites that practice Unethical SEO popularly referred to as “Black Hat SEO.”

In this article, we will be looking at ethical ways to carry out SEO on our website without triggering the wrath of search engines.

What is White Hat SEO

In search engine optimization (SEO) terminology, white hat SEO refers to the usage of optimization strategies, techniques and tactics that focus on a human audience opposed to search engines and completely follows search engine rules and policies.

For example, a website that is optimized for search engines, yet focuses on relevancy and organic ranking is considered to be optimized using White techniques for SEO. Some examples of White Hat SEO techniques include using keywords and keyword analysis, backlinking, link building to improve link popularity, and writing content for human readers.

White Hat SEO is more frequently used by those who intend to make a long-term investment on their website. It is also referred to as an Ethical SEO.

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How to Do White Hat Techniques for SEO

When doing your SEO for either an e-commerce site, blog or a company's website, there are 3 areas you will need to focus.

• On-site SEO
• Technical SEO
• Off-site SEO

Let us look into them.

On-site SEO

This is a  White Hat technique for SEO that focuses on the structure of your website. Its main aim is to ensure that your site is user-friendly and search engine friendly.

It practices include;

• Title and Meta description optimisation
• Url structure
• Website Navigation
• Readability
• Image Optimisation
• Mobile Friendliness
• Website Speeds
• Quality Contents

Title and Meta Description:

Whether for an article on your website or for the website itself, your title and meta description as its own role to play in search engine rankings.

For best practices, the title of your content should carry the H1 header tag with your targeted keywords in it.

Meta- description is the few texts that appear below your content title when it appears on the search engine first page see the image below.

meta-description tells your audience what they should expect from your content.

Naturally, search engines scoop out meta descriptions from the first few sentences of your content.

However, we advise you create your own meta-description yourself. While you do this ensure;

• your target keywords are within the meta description
• it should not be more than 30 words.
• make it more compelling to attract a click

URL Structure: 

URL structure refers to the arrangement of your content address link as you can see in the image below.

When you create your content make sure you also work on it Url. Search engines start crawling a website content from the URL address and if your URL is not properly optimised you lose an opportunity to further convince search engines to increase your rankings.

To take advantage of URL structure in SEO do the following:

• include your target keywords in your URL
• use a hyphen to separate words
• make your URL memorable

Navigation: 

Your website navigation also matters. Search engine crawler thinks like humans and thus take a friendly website seriously. Visitor on your site should be able to move from one page to another and return back without any difficulty.

One navigation function that most people prefer to use is called“breadcrumbs”.

Breadcrumbs navigation which is derived from the Hansel and Gretel novel helps users easily navigate a website without any form of confusion.  From the image below, you can see how the little arrow shows the direction from which a user
has navigated on the website and how it makes it easy to locate their way back.

Readability: 

Search engines like Google read text using crawlers and because they are now not real people going through styled texts, a more satisfactory approach is to make search crawlers understand the context of your HTML textual content.

below are some recommendations;

• Make use of h1 tags on the homepage
• H2 and h3 tags should be used topically in your articles;
• Format texts with a description in italics.
• make use of bullet points when necessary.
• make use of the bold, italic attribute when necessary
• Ensure you use indents for quotations

Image Optimisation:

Optimising pictures on your web page makes search engines like google crawlers capable of reading or finding it. It's very difficult for search engines crawlers to examine an image on a website. When an image that isn't optimised is crawled, search engine sees a big space in between text and will determine that such content was not nicely arranged and therefore would possibly reduce your web page ranking or even see such content as irrelevant.

To resolve this Issue, ensure you make use of;

Title tags: this should be related to your content.

Alt tag: this attribute makes search engine crawlers read your image as text. The alt tag should be the same as the content title.

Images also contribute to slowing down your website speed and thus you need to also optimise it by reducing the size.

Mobile Friendliness: 

Most people access the internet using their mobile phone. According to Google - users spend 177 minutes on the internet using their using their mobile phones - For you to take advantage of this, your website needs to be responsive to all screen size, particularly mobile devices.

Also, mobile friendliness is now at the core front of Google search engine result when it comes to Seo. If you are going to design your website from scratch, ensure you notify the web developer to make the website mobile friendly. If you are using WordPress or blogger search for a template that is mobile friendly and responsive.

Website Speed: 

One of the major ranking factors apart from the ones mentioned above is your website speed.

Imagine you searched for something online and then the first website link that pops up from the result spent more than 1 minute to load, how will you feel?
Disappointed right? True

It the same way search engine crawlers feels when they check your website speed and it does take time to load. A slow loading website not only loses SEO benefits but also customers.

A lot of things can affect your website speed.

• Your website host - use Bluehost, GoDaddy and Hostgator for best performance.
• Javascript - minify complex javascript
• Images - optimise images
• And some HTML codes - minify complex HTML codes.

To test your website speed use Google's page speed or for better result go for Pingdom

Quality content: 

What ranks more? Quality contents or lengthy content? This has been a debate among bloggers, but the truth remains that quality content beats it.

Creating relevant and quality content is the most important factor when it comes to SEO. It is the bedrock of your website and also the determinant for search engine ranking.

Search engine crawlers dislike plagiarism and spelling errors. That is why when creating a blog post, you must be extra careful. Cross check or proofread your work before publishing as simple wrong spellings can affect your SEO negatively.

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Technical SEO

This is usually considered the foundation of your White Hat techniques for SEO. Technical SEO is the techniques you perform on your website to enables search engines to crawl and index your website to make it visible on search engines.

They are the first steps to getting found on Search engines.

This is how it is done:

Submit your website to Search Engines: The first step after building your website is to let search engines know that it is available. To do this submit your website to Google, Bing and other available search engines.

It is also of best practice to submit each page of your website to search engines individually.

Submit a Sitemap: Once you have submitted your website to the search engine webmasters. You need to give them access to all your pages and content for crawling and indexing. To do this create a sitemap and submit it to the search engine webmaster

Create a Robot.txt: There might be some pages you don't intend to crawl on your website. A robot.txt helps tell webmasters and search engine how to crawl your website and what pages need to be indexed.

Create a 404 Error page: 404 error pages are is a user-friendly page that appears when readers try to access a page that doesn't exist or has been deleted. For search crawlers, 404 error pages notify them that a particular page is not available on your website.

If you have deleted several posts on your blog or website before, note that these pages might still be indexed by search engines and will still be crawled, without a 404 error page, crawlers will see your website as lacking structure and thus not user-friendly.

The negative result will be taking you off search engines rank pages. To create a 404 error page is easy.

For bloggers, download templates that automatically comes with a well structured 404 error page. Just search for it on Google or you head over to your blogger dashboard

• Go to settings
• Select search preferences
• Under the "error and redirection," you will see "custom page not found"'
• Edit it using HTML tag and voila your 404 error page has been created.

For WordPress users, the Yoast SEO plugin comes with a 404 error inbuilt feature.

Off Page SEO

When it comes to off page SEO, we are basically talking about using social signal to help boost our SEO.

If you have ever noticed, there are sometimes you search for something on Google and the result is a link from either facebook or twitter or other social media platform that redirects to the main website...

So let us get started.....

When it comes to off page SEO, put the 3 points below in mind.

• Backlink building
• Social Media
• Social Bookmarking

Backlink Building: To be fair and square backlink building is the most difficult part of search engine optimisation, yet it is the fastest way to sky-rocket to the front page of search engines.

A research carried out by Backlinko last year revealed that link building has more impact on SEO than any other factor. In fact, Google named it has their top 3 ranking factor for search engine result page (SERP).

However, when it comes to link building several factors need to be considered;

• · Quality of the link
• · Authority of the page or site that is backlinking you
• · Site relevance
• · "no-follow" and "do-follow": "NoFollow" links are not recognized by search engines but "do-follow" is.

Now that you have these factors in mind, how do we get backlinks? follow these simple tricks

• Share your post on forums: share your post on several forums with a link back to the main article. just drop a snippet of your post and redirect readers to finish reading it by clicking the link to the main article. Places like Quora, Medium and Reddit are strong places to get backlinks

• Notify your fellow bloggers in your niche let them know you have written an interesting article, email them with your link.

• Ping: Pinging is another way to get backlinks. there are several tools to aid you to ping. For blogger users, Feedburner automatically pings out your link to notify indexing site. Another tool you can use is Pingbomb.

You can get a concrete detail of backlink building here


Social Media: Of course you don't have to be told that once you have created a nice article, the first place to share it is on social media. There was a time social media wasn't considered as a factor for SEO. But now the amount of shares, likes, retweets and the referral links it sends to your website notifies search engine crawlers that the website is relevant and engaging and thus can boost your search engine ranking in a way you can never imagine.

Ensure to share your articles on Google+, Facebook pages, Facebook groups, Twitter, Linkedin, and Pinterest.

You can also decide to run a promotion for the article you have written using Facebook ads.

Let us move to the last one

Social Bookmarking:

Social bookmarking is another off-page SEO practice that boosts search engine rankings. If you regularly create relevant, interesting and quality post, people will want to bookmark your website so as to get notified when there is an update from you.

They are online bookmarking site tools where readers can add a website the want update from regularly. Search engine bots usually crawl these tools to see how relevant a website link is. This is possible because of cookies. Through the use of cookies, crawlers are able to monitor readers behaviour online and when they notice that several people bookmarked a particular website then they notify search engines to push that link up to the first page.

An example of a bookmarking site and the most popular of them all is Mix, Digg.

Now how do you ensure your website is bookmarked? follow these guidelines...

• Create relevantly and quality content
• Make accounts on bookmarking sites. There are lots of them
• Email your subscribers to also bookmark your website.

Conclusion

SEO is a big part of being visible online especially on Google. The reason is not far fetched. When people want something or need information, the first thing that comes to their mind is "Google it".

Being visible on search engine simply means getting found on the first page of Google when people search for a keyword that is related to your business and your competitors.

In this article, I have shared the best practices of White hat techniques for SEO