What Is White Hat SEO?

The word white hat originates from old western movies where the nice guys wore the white hats and the crooks wore the black hats. Today the term white hat SEO refers to ethical internet 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 other sites and not buying links that your search engines don't like. If a link to another website has to be bought it's not really a true vote for that website, because it has been placed there just for financial gain and not because the hyperlink will be of genuine interest to those sites visitors.

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

Black hat techniques involve keyphrase stuffing which tries to fool the internet search engine into thinking that a typical page is of more relevance since it uses the keyphrase lots 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 cover up anything from their clients; they'll keep them involved as much as they could in the SEO process and never mislead them in how they achieve their results.

It is definitely best to analyze an organization before using them and read up about a few of the terminology used in this industry because it will give you a better understanding on what's associated with internet search engine optimization.

Another thing to be aware of is price, in case a company is offering cheap services this will mean they are cutting corners and using black hat SEO to attain results, as internet search engine optimization can be a long process which can take months prior to the effort pays off. So keep clear of companies that claim they could get quick results at knocked down prices.