SEO Foundation – the “White Hat” Basics

Posted: September, 18 2009

Every year SEO seems to get more complicated, and the Search Engines are getting smarter. However, the basics of search engine optimization have not changed in years. Implementing “white hat” techniques for your business is critical. The last thing you want to happen is to be permanently banned from Google for "black hat" tactics. The list down below is in no particular order, as different search engines emphasis different components – in addition to changing algorithms frequently. There is no magic solution to SEO, so don’t fall for the guarantees you see advertised.

Ranking for competitive words takes time, money, skill and a little help from lady luck from time to time. One of my favorite movie quotes applies (13th Warrior)– “Luck will often enough save a man, if his courage holds." In this case, try new things and don’t give up, you just might stumble upon something competitors haven’t figured out. Since no one knows exactly how Google and Yahoo!’s indexing algorithms work - if you follow the basic rules and try some new techniques, you have as good a chance at ranking where you want as anyone else.

How do I know what’s white hat and what’s black hat? Well if you are attempting to help the users on your site, then it’s typically a bonus in the White Hat world. If you are attempting to deceive the user, be sneaky or deceive the search engines, then it’s basically Black Hat. Not everything on the black hat list will get your site banned; many will actually just hurt your ranking score.  Abuse enough rules, do anything crazy or harmful, and you can say good-bye to getting indexed at all.

How long will organic ranking for my keyword take? Well that’s a loaded question with many variables, and unfortunately, no straight answer. The biggest variables you need to look at are: is this a popular keyword? How many competitors do I have? How many of the rules down below did I follow? How many of my competitors are following the rules? Breaking the rules? Etc.  Essentially it could take anywhere from a few days on long-tail searches, too months/years on specific words. The key is to keep building on your foundation, which you will establish with this list below.

Remember this basic rule: search engines are trying to help users. If you try and help users, then odds are, Search engines like it too.

  • Content is King
    You‘ve heard it before without a doubt.  This is common sense, but you need content to get indexed, and search engines view content as critical information on your site for obvious reasons.
  • <META> and <TITLE>
    Keywords, Descriptions and Follow Commands are important and often overlooked. Do they carry a lot of weight? Not typically, but often enough this can be enough to rank for obscure words and organization names. Most search engines see these as being an important description of the page’s content – take advantage of it.
  • Text Formatting
    <h1> and bold text are often regarded by search engines as being important information – that’s why you bold type text after all. <h1> or <h2> are usually a title of sorts, and often describes the pages content – and search engines know this.
  • Links on your pages
    Links on your site to other pages within your site, should contain the keyword or description of that page. This helps “clarify” what the user is clicking on, and gives the keyword a thumbs up from search engines.
  • Links to your site
    The links topic can get confusing quickly but is critical in your ranking. It’s important to have the Keyword be the link itself. (see “clarification” explanation above) By site “A” linking to site “B,” site “A” is saying “B“ is an expert on that keyword topic. By having many sites linking to you, or in effect, having many sites saying you are the expert on that keyword, you will see positive results over time for that particular keyword. It's important to have higher ranking sites link to you as they carry more weight, but usually any link even it's just to help increase traffic. The amount of outbound links you have to other sites should be monitored unless that's part of your web sites objective. Typically you want to limit links to lower ranking web sites than yours.

 

The next SEO article will talk about:

  • Site Crawling – including Flash, Frames and JavaScript
  • Dynamic Content – how, why, when?
  • Pages and Directories names
  • Images
  • Google Rank