White-Hat Search Engine Positioning Tactics
 |
Any search engine positioning tactic that maintains the integrity
of your website and the SERPs (search engine results pages)
is considered a "white-hat" search engine positioning
tactic. These are the only tactics that we will use whenever
applicable and which enhance rather than detract from your website
and from the rankings. |
White-Hat Search Engine Positioning
Tactics:
Internal Linking
By far one of the easiest ways to stop your website from ranking
well on the search engines is to make it difficult for search engines
to find their way through it. Many sites use some form of script
to enable fancy drop-down navigation, etc. Many of these scripts
cannot be followed by the search engines resulting in unindexed
pages.
While many of these effects add visual appeal to a website, if
you are using scripts or some other form of navigation that will
hinder the spidering of your website it is important to add text
links to the bottom of at least your homepage linking to all you
main internal pages including a sitemap
to your internal pages.
Reciprocal Linking
Exchanging links with other webmasters is a good way (not
the best, but good) of attaining additional incoming links to your
site. While the value of reciprocal links has declined a bit over
the past year they certainly still do have their place.
A VERY important note is that if you do plan on building reciprocal
links it is important to make sure that you do so intelligently.
Random reciprocal link building in which you exchange links with
any and virtually all sites that you can will not help you over
the long run. Link only to sites that are related to yours and who's
content your visitors will be interested in and preferably which
contain the keywords that you want to target. Building relevancy
through association is never a bad thing unless you're linking to
bad neighborhoods (penalized industries and/or websites).
If you are planning or currently do undertake reciprocal link building
you know how time consuming this process can be. An useful tool
that can speed up the process is PRProwler. Essentially this tool
allows you to find related sites with high PageRank, weeding out
many of the sites that would simply be a waste of time to even visit.
You can read more about PRProwler on our search
engine positioning tools page.
Content Creation
Don't confuse "content creation" with doorway pages
and the such. When we recommend content creation we are discussing
creating quality, unique content that will be of interest to your
visitors and which will add value to your site.
The more content-rich your site is the more valuable it will appear
to the search engines, your human visitors, and to other webmasters
who will be far more likely to link to your website if they find
you to be a valuable resource on their subject.
Creating good content can be very time-consuming, however it will
be well worth the effort in the long run. As an additional bonus,
these new pages can be used to target additional keywords related
to the topic of the page.
Writing For Others
You know more about your business that those around you so why not
let everyone know? Whether it be in the form of articles, forum
posts, or a spotlight piece on someone else's website, creating
content that other people will want to read and post on their sites
is one of the best ways to build links to your website that don't
require a reciprocal link back.
 Site
Optimization
The alteration of your content, wording, and site structure
for the purpose of attaining high search engine positioning is the
backbone of SEO and the search engine positioning industry. Everything
from creating solid title and meta tags to tweaking the content
to maximize it's search engine effectiveness is key to any successful
optimization effort.
That said, it is of primary importance that the optimization of
a website not detract from the message and quality of content contained
within the site. There's no point in driving traffic to a site that
is so poorly worded that it cannot possibly convey the desired message
and which thus, cannot sell. Site optimization must always take
into account the maintenance of the salability and solid message
of the site while maximizing it's exposure on the search engines.
For additional information on site optimization tactics that work
feel free to browse our search
engine positioning articles.
Also See:
Grey-Hat Search Engine Positioning
Tactics
Black-Hat Search Engine Positioning Tactics
Reporting Search Engine Spam |
