Many SEO sites use the term ‘white hat’ to describe their SEO tactics, and quite often they describe tactics that aren’t truly white hat. While they ARE describing tactics that aren’t BLACK in nature, they aren’t white either. There is plenty of gray area and while most people believe that what’s gray is white – it isn’t.

To talk about pure white hat SEO, we have to only talk about tactics that Google would be ok with. For the record, Google really isn’t ok with SEO in general, but there are some techniques that can be used to help your cause. This lesson will talk only about techniques that Google would approve of.

Blogs Are The Ultimate White Hat SEO Tool

Not everyone wants to be a blogger and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, there isn’t a better white hat SEO tool out there in my opinion. Here are some of the characteristics of blogs that very much fall inline with white SEO:

• Newest content is listed in very visible locations. This allows blog readers/users to find it quite easily.
• Blogs build audiences. Your audience is the absolute best place to get white links.
• Ping characteristics – you get at least some links by simply publishing a post.

When you blog, you’re trying to get a group of people that likes you and follows you. You need to see this as a two-sided relationship. You are giving them information that’s free in exchange for links. Your ability to produce high quality information is what determines the amount of links you’re able to get. If you can consistently produce information that is helpful and compelling, you should be rewarded with an increase in readership and links.

Blogging is the ultimate ’start small’ business. The cost of entry is usually less than $10 and while this is nice, it means that it’s going to take a ton of work in the beginning. A new blogger probably won’t find himself with a huge readership within a few weeks, in fact it’s a lot more likely that it will take a few years.

When I started Court’s Internet Marketing School, there were a few things that I did to get the right kind of readers. I started by trying to find blogs of beginners who were interested in making money online. To do this, I used a few different methods:

• Searched in Technorati for related blogs that weren’t established.
• Searched Google for Blogger blogs and WordPress.com blogs that were related to my topic.
• Searched MyBlogLog.com for related blogs

After you find the right people, you have to make contact. I found that most beginners get way excited when anyone comments on their site. They will almost always visit your site if you comment on theirs.

A while back I was talking to a friend who is trying to establish a new blog. He had spent almost an entire week trying to contact A-list bloggers. This was exactly the wrong approach for him. The A-list is extremely hard to impress. He needs to be finding the beginners right now so that he can find followers who are impressed by him. That way he can get himself some links now while he’s establishing his reputation. Note: these links will be from exactly the right sites – sites about the same topic he’s blogging about.

White hat SEO is a process of getting links from smaller sites in the beginning while you gain traction. If you’re going to eventually try to get some links from the best and biggest sites in your industry, you will first need to make sure that they know who you are. This happens when they see links to you on sites that they are already familiar with.

A major key to getting the right kind of links is using keywords within your post/article titles. When a person links to a piece of content, they will almost always use the title of that piece of content as the anchor. Using a catchy name containing your keyword phrase is an enormous skill that every white hat SEO practitioner needs to be able to execute.

While in the beginning I tried hard to get links from beginners, I eventually had to try to ‘move up in the world’. After a while, I started to make friends with some mid-level bloggers. These are bloggers that have more than 500 readers (or so). You make friends with people by helping them out. I wrote some posts for some of these sites, and helped answer people’s questions in their comments. One of the biggest mistakes that many bloggers make is that they try to make friends by asking for help. You shouldn’t have to attend a social class to know that asking people for help all the time is just plain annoying to the people you’re asking.

If you want to make an impression with these people, you should link to them and help them. Send them some of the traffic that you have and after time you will make an impression. Later on you will reap the rewards of this but you need to remember that this isn’t an overnight process.

Once you get linked to from some of the mid-level bloggers it becomes a lot easier to get links from the A-list sites. Since most of them will keep up with the mid-level sites, they will hear about you and become familiar with you. This will be quite important because when you do contact them, you need them to already know who you are.

The best way to get links from the A-list is by guest posting on their sites. I’ve posted on each of the biggest sites in my industry and I did this by ‘moving up the ladder’ from smaller to mid-level sites and then by providing my best content to the A-list sites. When you guest post on a blog, they should always allow you to link back to your site. Those links are gold if they are from strong sites in your industry and they are also 100% white hat.

White Hat Techniques That You Might Not Have Thought Of

1. Bringing back old posts/articles on the same URL. Let’s say there’s a post or article that you put up a while back – maybe it got you a few links. If it’s been a few months and you can improve the post, you’ll probably get more links the second time around, especially if your audience has grown. Bringing this post back to the homepage will give it more visibility and link love. In order for this technique to really work you’ll need to use a keyword you want to rank for in your post title.

The trick here is that in order to bring a post or article back to the homepage of your site, you won’t be able to use dates in your URLs. This may be difficult (impossible) with Blogger, but it’s pretty easy using WordPress or Joomla. A slightly less effective version of this technique would be creating a new post or article and then redirecting the old post to the new one with a 301 redirect. You would lose some of the link weight of the old post, but would pass some of it through the redirect.

2. Writing a series about a topic. When you use this technique, you should have a ‘homepage’ for the series that you link back to each time you create a new article for the series. Each section of the series gives a reader the chance to get excited and when they feel that excitement they will link back. A longer series of this kind often gives you the chance to get many links back to the homepage of the series. This technique is white hat to a tee because the focus is in creating the best resource out there on a given topic and all of the links generated will be 100% natural.

When you create the homepage for your series, you need to name it correctly so that the links that you get will line up with what the keyword you want to rank for. You also need to make sure that the series provides what the searchers are looking for.

3. Releasing tools is a fantastic way you can go about getting links. Bloggers in almost every industry try to keep up on the news and releasing a free tool that’s actually useful is almost always news.

Some people take this across the line between white and gray hat SEO. If you created a widget for people to use on their sites and embedded an anchored link, this would be very gray hat and Google wouldn’t like it if they figured it out.

The way to keep it white hat is to simply release the tool and then run a press release to sites in your industry. Let the people link to the tool however they want to. The right name for the tool might help you to get the anchors you want.

4. Using social networks like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Mixx, and others are great ways to get white hat links. If you get a lot of social votes, you will get increased exposure and that often leads to more links.

Social traffic isn’t easy to monetize and I’ve always seen social methods only as a way to get links – links that will lead to an increase in search traffic.

The fact of the matter is that your RSS count is directly tied to your ability to get social votes. The more people your work gets in front of, the more social votes you’ll be able to get when you publish something great. Most people go wrong by trying to scam the social systems instead of creating a real audience and really great content.

The Truth Is That Very Few Sites Are Legitimately White

The truth is that most sites out there are gray hat. Black hatters expect to get caught and eventually they usually do. This is fine for them because they try to make their money in a hurry and then change strategies when they get busted. White hatters often don’t get anywhere because honestly it’s a lot more difficult to stay white hat and get results.

If you want to stay 100% white hat and get results, you are going to have to create articles and materials that really help people. If you can do that, you’ll be fine. If you can’t, you’ll probably never get much by way of search traffic. You’ll need to focus on building a true audience and you’ll then need to get them to link to your site.

Some people are more comfortable being in the gray world because they don’t have to get as much response from other people. There’s nothing wrong with this as long as you understand the risks of doing things the gray way. If you stay white, you shouldn’t really have anything to worry about, as long as you can get results.

 

 

Tags: offsite SEO, onsite SEO, SEO, white hat SEO

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 2:07 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.