An Introduction to White Hat SEO
There are sets of rules that define the characteristics of White Hat analysts:

• Data

By understanding the limitations to traditional site side data, more complete understanding can be reached. Incorporating tertiary data flows, like qualitative marketplace analysis or natural yearly cycles, helps inform the analyst of the true story that the information is telling.

Because of the proliferation of analytic tools, analysts must be ready to incorporate such tools into their analysis. Things such as competitive analysis and brand perception rarely show up in the straight numbers but the savvy White Hatter will be able to introduce their implications into conclusions.

• Business Results

Never get bogged down in the infinite whirlpool of accuracy. With a taste for skepticism will come an appetite for the broad strokes of business performance inquiry. Setting benchmarks will allow for other exogenous tools to be finessed for more subtle reading of the data. As opposed to relying completely on the straight data for immutable conclusions such attenuated thinking can be clear in its cause and effect possibilities without ever straying into the certainty that can sink businesses.

Cause and effect analysis
Being willing to take in information from all sides and mediums makes the job of constructing solutions to business problems much more fluid. The White Hat analyst waits and watches and is ready to lend a hand to guide the steering wheel once the course has been set. Outcomes are the only thing that matters, as they trump logic and precipitate action.

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.

In the cartoon we are introduced to two characters, both are spies bent on the other’s destruction, and both are monochromatic, one white one black. They battle each other relentlessly, the black spy consistently outsmarting and killing the white spy because he is willing to go beyond the rules, to exploit the white spy’s naiveté. It is in the battle, which has no reason and no end, that we are led to realize there are no ‘good guys’ and no ‘bad guys’ just the struggle for dominance, and the one confined by less rules, is bound to win.

They require each other to exist and so as much as they are separate they are also one. In many ways this cartoon is at the heart of both the way we define White Hat and Black Hat SEO Marketing techniques. White Hats are bound by the rules because of ethics and Black Hats are renegades, bound by nothing except for profit. As we will see in our investigation of the both the prevailing definitional norms associated with White Hats and the rationales behind the actual practices, we couldn’t be further from “black and white”. Because in a world as competi- tive as Internet marketing there is no room for static definitions and all the advantage needed is found between the lines. But before following this more ambiguous line of reasoning, let’s venture down a more established path.

Unlike the White Spy in Spy vs. Spy, this article will put forth an argument that suggests modified and creative White Hat methods are superior to strictly Black Hat Methods. We are also going to demonstrate that the most important part of being successful as an Internet Marketer is to stop abiding by a rigid set of definitions about how to make your fortune and embrace a larger sense of creativity.