Posts Tagged ‘white hat SEO’

How To Really Execute White Hat SEO

December 1st, 2008  |  by Court  |  Published in SEO  |  10 Comments

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.

The 5 Basic Steps Of Onsite SEO

November 21st, 2008  |  by Court  |  Published in SEO  |  34 Comments

These are the 5 basic steps that you should follow when you’re trying to optimize any web page. You would use these steps whether you were trying to optimize your home page, a sub page, a post page, or any other type of page. The basic rules of onsite SEO are always the same.

1. Make sure that your keyword appears in the HTML title tag of the page you’re trying to optimize. This is without question the single most important factor of onsite SEO. Yes, you can still get a page to rank for a keyword without having the keyword in the title, but it will be much more difficult.

2. Use the keyword towards the top of the page in a bold (or large) font. If you’re using WordPress or Blogger to create your site, this will be taken care of for you by using your keyword in your post title. If you’re creating a site in hard HTML, make sure you use your keyword as part of a bold title at the top of the page.

3. Use the keyword within the text of the page. Many SEO sites will tell you that you must use a certain percentage of keyword density to achieve optimum rankings. In my experience this isn’t true. However, it’s wise to use the keyword two or three times on the page. If you have an exceptionally large amount of text on the page (more than 1,000 words), you can get away with using the keyword more often.

4. Use at least 300 words of total text on the page. You can of course get a ranking with less textual content. Actually, you can get a ranking with no content at all. However, this will make it much more difficult. If we’re going for optimal pages, they need to have 300+ words of content.

5. Use the keyword in a link that points to another related page. This aspect is easily taken care of by using the keyword as a tag or label with blogging software like WordPress or Blogger. Those using a static HTML site will have to create another page within their site that they can link to. You could also link to a related page on another site, except you would then be passing some link and keyword authority to a potential competitor. Unless you could get them to pass it back, I don’t think that would be the best idea.

Many people will tell you that onsite SEO is much more complicated than this – it honestly isn’t. Follow these steps for each page you need to optimize and you’ll do at least as well as you would by following more complicated systems. You will also be safe from potential keyword stuffing penalties from Google and other search engines.

Introduction To SEO

November 17th, 2008  |  by Court  |  Published in SEO  |  23 Comments

Writing an introductory post about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is quite difficult. At best, SEO is a multi-headed beast that will take some time to learn to tame. At worst, it’s a never-ending and changing labyrinth that will leave many of you puzzled and perpetually confused.

SEO is 100% about getting your site to rank well in search engines, more specifically in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Since Google is currently taking about 65% market share in the English speaking search market, your efforts should focus there. Incidentally, Yahoo and MSN are shifting their search engines more and more to act like Google’s, so your efforts with Google will actually make a pretty large difference with the other two.

Before we dig in, let’s set the record straight. You aren’t going to learn to use SEO to create traffic in one day. You’re going to have to test and then test some more. I’ll lay out the course, but you have to do the lab work. I can’t do that for anyone.

This lesson will break down the basic concepts that you will need to learn in order to create traffic with SEO. I’m simply not going to cover stuff that doesn’t make a difference anymore, so you may notice that concepts you’ve learned in the past aren’t here. Here are the basic ideas we’re going to talk about:

Onsite Optimization

  • Optimizing HTML Titles
  • Optimizing Page Content
  • Optimized Tagging
  • Optimized Linking Within Site

Offsite Optimization

  • Basic Overview Of Offsite SEO
  • White Hat Link Building
  • Grey Hat Link Building
  • Black Hat Link Building (not recommended)

Most people I have met focus on the on-page stuff and honestly, that doesn’t do a whole lot for you. You can tweak and test your on-page optimization all year and you’ll never see much improvement.

Google puts a lot more emphasis on the links pointing to a page than they do on the content that appears on the page. In other words, a worthless page with links pointing at it is more likely to rank well than a great page with no links pointing at it. That said, great pages usually attract links so the great pages usually have more links than worthless pages and Google operates on this principle.

Onsite Optimization

This part of the puzzle is actually very easy. Follow this simple walk-through and you’ll be done with your onsite SEO. Of course, you will need to do it for each page you’re trying to optimize:

  • Make sure the keyword you want to rank for is in the HTML title tag of the page you’re trying to get to rank well. The page will rank fine if the keyword is in there by itself and it will rank well if the title also contains other words. Seriously, either way is perfectly fine – just make sure your keyword is in there.
  • Place your keyword two or three times within the content of the page you’re trying to get to rank well. If you have more than 500 words of content on the page, you can use the keyword four or five or even six times. Now, all of you detail-oriented people out there will be trying to nail down exact numbers here. Don’t. Follow the basic guidelines and that’s it.
  • Use your keyword as a tag at the end of the article. If you use WordPress or Blogger, tagging is quite easy. If you use something else, you’ll have to create tags manually. Tags are actually just links with a special piece of code on them. If you have to create them manually, here’s a Tag Generator you can use.
  • Edit some other pages of your site and create links that point at the page you’re trying to get to rank well. Use your keyword as anchor text in those links. The more links you point, the better your page will rank.

Onsite SEO isn’t rocket science. Those are the only concepts you need to know.

Offsite Optimization

Offsite optimization, or offsite SEO, is simply the optimization that happens off of your site. Search engines primarily use links to determine which pages to rank in the best locations. It’s very much a popularity contest. The pages with the most links will rank the best.

When Google finds two or more pages on the same topic, they will examine each to find out which is the most popular. The page that has the most or best links pointing at it will be chosen by Google as the best.

There are some different factors that Google uses to determine which links are the best links but this isn’t rocket science either. Links from better sites are better links. Basically, a link from your Grandma’s knitting blog won’t count for as much as a link from The Wall Street Journal would. Additionally, links from related sites will help you more than links from sites that aren’t related to yours.

Anchor text, the text that links are made out of, also affects search rankings significantly. If you get a link that uses the keyword you’re trying to rank for as anchor text, it will make more difference than a link that uses something else as the anchor text. A related anchor will help more than a unrelated anchor.

White Hat Link Building

White hat link building is the kind that Google is 100% ok with. You’re very limited in what you can do if you want to stay within what Google wants.

If you’re going to try to stay white hat, you can basically create killer stuff on your site that will get linked to naturally. It’s ok to let people know about it and it’s even ok to ask them to link to it.

With white hat, your site will only gets links that it deserves because of the content you’ve put together.

Google has also said that it’s ok to submit your site to online directories, so this is ok. However, manipulation of anchor text when you submit to directories wouldn’t be ok if you wanted to stay totally white. Google has explicitly warned against linking techniques that manipulate search rankings. To stay white, you would have to submit to directories using your site’s name as the titled anchor text.

Grey Hat Link Building

Grey hat consists of almost all of the link building the most SEOs use. Link trading, keyword-using directory submission, article distribution, and site-interlinking would all fall into the grey.

Almost everyone thinks these techniques are 100% ok but they actually aren’t. Many people get away with most of them but the honest truth is that they are definitely grey area. Google and other search engines would prefer to not see any linking techniques that manipulate search rankings and these clearly do.

Many SEOs use grey hat techniques but you will have to decide what is and isn’t worth the risk for you.

Black Hat Link Building

This is the stuff that falls way outside the guidelines set forth by Google. This is the spam-farming, comment spamming, and hacking that many black hats actively participate in. I personally would never get involved in this stuff because unless you’re very advanced, you’re more likely to get banned than you are to succeed at it.

There are still a lot of black hats making money, in fact one of my sites is currently competing against quite a few black hatters. Since this is a very bad idea for most people, I’m never going to talk about these methods and would never use any of them myself. I simply see them when I’m looking at my competition.

SEO In A Nutshell

SEO is getting the right words on the page and then building the right links to point at the page. If you’re getting out-ranked, you’re probably getting out-linked.