There are some basic concepts that help to define practitioners of White Hat Marketing Search Engine Optimization (SEO). One of the primary notions is that White Hats are using techniques defined and approved by search engines themselves. This makes their web-design concerns sync-step with the intended user experience, which is what Google’s ever-changing algorithm is designed to discern and promote. Transparency is a ubiquitous catch phrase articulating a design goal. The point is to create a site that is apparent to both the user and the search engines, nothing was built ‘behind’ the scenes to either fool the user or the search engines. This is an important and distinguishing characteristic of White Hats.

The White Hatter is conspicuously concerned with exercising an ethical and moral code that’s underlying principle is defined by rankings being a true reflection of the site’s usefulness to the user. The more useful your site becomes, with unique high-quality content, proper html tags specifying page topics, keyword rich URLs and reliable links with other ‘good’ sites are the surefire ways to rise in the rankings. These are all topics we will cover more rigorously, and there is certainly depth to these practices, but in essence, they are self-explanatory.

To understand a thing one must delve into the mechanics of how it works and how it is put together. White Hat SEO is very much determined by this particular understanding, measuring its success by how thoroughly it can integrate all the rules of the game into the business development stages of an opening Search Engine salvo. By discussing the techniques a web business has available to it, we can perhaps start to understand the ‘more than meets the eye’ nature of White Hat SEO development and all that it can accomplish.

Domain Naming
How businesses name their sites can be a tricky endeavor, and while most of us are busy buying up the clever names we have named our site, a good web site business owner will be more concerned about buying URL names that are related to the actual product they are selling. As opposed to traditional business branding that reminds us of concepts or emotions marketers wish us to associate with their product, the Internet market place is built on a “literal reality”. Consumers buy when they find exactly what they are looking for.

Keeping a product closely associated with the words that buyers are looking for is the best way to make sure people find you when they find what they are looking for. Hyphenating is a good way to make sure that you can have both a business name and the product description right in the URL.

Another way to compliment this idea is to buy multiple URLs with a number of different keyword combination and then have them all point back to your main site. This way you can keep your brand name as well as optimizing your keywords.

Content Manipulation
The refrain “Content is King” rings like church bells calling White Hat experts to supplicate at the altar of SEO. The reason for this is because it doesn’t actually mean very much by itself, since it is how content is constructed in relationship to the direction of the prevailing winds that search engine algorithms are blowing in. Right now content is defined by a few basic components that add value to its presence on a website.

Since human adjudication of all websites on a search engine is obviously a logistical impossibility, evaluating something like content, which requires a degree of comprehension to gauge its use to the public, needs a defined set of automated points of reference to give it a Quality Score.

These rules govern the Google spiders.
Keyword density is one of the terms that help the spiders decide how compliant content is with the standards that Google and the other search engines are looking for. Density helps to determine how natural the content will read. During the formative years of search engine technologies a classic cheat for website owners would be to stuff some of their pages with tons of keywords. This was obviously not particularly useful for anyone except the people trying to cheat the system, and so simple volume ceased being the criteria for value and density, or the ratio of keywords to total words comprises a reasonable threshold of that will appear natural to the user when reading.

This threshold for visible content is thought to be set around 3-5%, but this can be higher when counting the times that your keywords appear in your site’s meta tags, alt tags, descriptions tag and comment tag. Some SEO experts suggest that this number, which can be as high as 20-30% is more useful as spiders aggregate the site’s entire content.

Link Building
According to many SEO analysts, links between sites are as important or more important than any other method in helping the Search Engines determine value and trustworthiness of a site. Links act as a value aggregators, compounding the other sets of value indicators that users provide by visiting sites and staying (Click Through Rates), visiting their forums, bookmarking their pages, as well as the amount of original, updated and valuable content a site has available.

Linking to a site has the kind of self regulating quality to it that search engines depend on, and as a result they allow a little of the pixie dust from successful sites to rub off on sites that are able to solicit a link. As long as HTTP is the only protocol that the internet uses or until some more intelligent interface or Semantic Web, which would enable computers to do more talking and organizing on their own, links are the best way to guide SERPs (Search Engine Rankings Page). This is not to say that Google has not made their analysis of links more sophisticated, reducing the value on volume and focusing on quality, relevant over non-relevant and industry links outweighing generic links.