What does White Hat SEO mean in SEO?

White Hat SEO is the general term given to optimising a website without breaking the terms of use of any search engine.

As search engines use robots to index the internet White Hat work is generally focused on making a website easier for a machine to read and understand while maintaining a user friendly interface for humans and carrying out clean, clear marketing activities around the web.

Examples of White Hat SEO include:

• Code - Correcting and optimizing the code of a website to ensure search engines fully understand its content (for a full list of what is involved in this process see Plan your SEO process).
• Content - creating quality content that others will want to share and link to.


• Analysing competitors - to understand how your website could rank higher without risking penalties or bans.
• Article writing - Creating unique and well written articles to be posted on respected sites such as eHow. Identifying content from the website that could be referenced from article sites like Wikipedia.
• Forum and discussion board links - Taking active part in discussions on forums or groups related to the subject of your website and placing a link to your website from that discussion when and where it adds value to the forum.
• Comment links - Writing full responses to stories and questions where an effective link to your website can also be inserted.
• YouTube - Creating useful and popular videos on YouTube which promote your website.
• Social networking - Using Twitter, Facebook and other social media to promote your website without misleading users.
• Bookmarking - Using bookmarking sites such as Digg and Delicious in a targeted way (not scatter gun spamming).

White Hat is all about optimizing real content while Black Hat is all about misleading. The website is not good enough to be popular as it stands so search engines or users will need to be mislead to make it rank.

See also:
- Black Hat SEO
- Grey Hat SEO