White Hat SEO

The term white hat originates from old western movies where the good guys wore the white hats and the bad guys wore the black hats. Today, the term white hat SEO refers to ethical search engine optimization techniques and black hat SEO refers to unethical approaches.

White hat SEO follows the guidelines set down by the search engines themselves such as naturally linking to others sites and not buying links which the search engines don’t like. If a link to another website has to be bought it’s not a true vote for that website, as it has been placed there only for financial gain and not because the link would be of genuine interest to the websites visitors.

The use of keyphrases can also be considered white or black hat as white hat SEO’rs will use keyphrases in the natural context of a body of text, if you write your web copy for your visitors and not the search engines you will achieve better results.

Black hat techniques involve keyphrase stuffing which tries to fool the search engine into thinking that a page is of more relevance because it uses the keyphrase loads of times. The search engines have algorithms for detecting this and can penalize a site for using these techniques.

A white hat company will never try to hide anything from their clients; they will always keep them involved as much as they can in the SEO process and never mislead them in how they achieve their results.

If you are looking for a white hat SEO company that only ever uses ethical SEO techniques I would recommend these people as I have used them on a few of my websites and always found them to be very upfront with what they do and how they do it.

It is always best to research a company before using them and read up about some of the terminology used in this industry as it will give you a better understanding on what is involved in search engine optimization.

One other thing to look out for is price, if a company is offering cheap services this could mean they are cutting corners and using black hat SEO to achieve results, as search engine optimization can be a long process which can take months before the hard work pays off. So be wary of companies that claim they can get quick results at knocked down prices.