If you’re an entrepreneur with an online site, It’s likely you’ll have heard of ‘white hat’ and ‘black hat’ SEO practices. But what exactly do these terms mean, what’s the difference – and why is it important?
What is white hat SEO?
Simply put, white hat SEO means SEO best practice – the things you should be doing SEO-wise to boost your website’s ranking organically. This means following basic guidelines on what Google deems to be ‘good’ SEO practice: no keyword stuffing, no paying for low quality or spam backlinks, not duplicating content from other sites (among many other things.)
What is the difference between white hat SEO and black hat SEO?
White hat SEO is the opposite of black hat SEO, which effectively entails using methods that Google will not reward to boost your site’s rankings. You can see a list of white hat SEO compared to black hat SEO below to see the difference.
Keyword density
The number of times your keyword appears in a piece of content.
Black hat SEO practice involves what is known as ‘keyword stuffing’ – this means a keyword will appear over and over again in a piece of content, its titles or a meta description to fit the keyword in as many times as possible. Rather than signal its relevance, however, this indicates to Google that the content is not of high quality.
White hat SEO practice involves weaving a keyword organically into your content, keeping all text as natural as possible. This will indicate to Google a text’s quality.
Quality
The quality of a piece of content.
Black hat SEO practice might involve duplicating and plagiarising content from another website (or even from another page on your own site), not including external or internal links, not separating the content into easily digestible paragraphs, bullet points or headings.
White hat SEO practice involves making sure a text is completely original and unique, will include external and internal links and will be easy for a reader to navigate – the text might be broken up into headers, paragraphs, bullet points, graphics or tables.
Link building
Backlinks to your site from another website.
Black hat SEO practice will involve paying for backlinks across multiple sites, which indicates to Google that these are not high quality links.
White hat SEO practice will involve gaining backlinks organically, perhaps via content collaboration or through the sheer quality of content alone.
Why is white hat SEO important?
White hat SEO is important because following SEO best practice will help your site’s rankings hugely. While black hat SEO techniques can achieve short-term success, only white hat SEO will ensure your site sees great results in the long term.
You should always follow best practice guidelines on keyword density, content quality, link building and other elements of SEO in order to see your content rewarded by Google. This ensures you will be in with the best chances of climbing the rankings for your target search terms – ensuring you reach your audience in an organic and genuine way.
Want to boost your brand’s SEO? Get in touch to find out how we can help your business: contact@edytagrace.com
Try our SEO services here.
