White Hat SEO Practices

Titles and Meta Data: There was a time Meta Data (hidden at the top of each page) was a mjor component to a successfully optimized website for search engines; this included 'keywords' and 'description'. Because of unethical behavior, those items aren't nearly as important today. We still add the basics though, a short descriptive sentence customized to each page, and no more then 5 keywords.

Titles still have power! Each needs to be customized for the specific page. If they aren't reflective of the content on the page, they're useless.

Effective Keywords: That means researching your market and specific product and/or services. Multi-word phrases are more effective then single words, for example: "Nutcracker patterns" is far more effective then using either of those words singularly. Generic or common words/terms will turn up 100's of thousand's of results. For example: "replacement windows" in a local search, resulted in 2.970,000 hits! Get more specific for your particular product.

These keywords/phrases need to be a part of your pages content, titles, links, meta data etc. But please remember, they need to be natural part of the written content. Keyword stuffing is a no-no.

Content & User Experience: Is there 'real' content? Not a couple of sentences or just a holding place for ads - but REAL informational content. Can the user find things easily? Is navigation obvious? Links visible? If the user can't 'use' the site - the search engines will know.

Semantic Mark Up: Simply put it means marking up your pages (coding wise) with the best possible structure for the search engines to follow. That means 'clean code', using CSS (cascading style sheets) correctly, combining all JS scripts etc. This all helps to seperate the design elements from the actual content; that means the search engines can spider, and list your content faster, and more accurately.

Sometimes called Ethical SEO, in search engine optimization (SEO) terminology. White Hat SEO refers to the usage of optimization strategies, techniques, and tactics that focus on a human audience as opposed to search engines. White Hat SEO completely follows search engine rules and policies.

When x-SITE-d builds your website, we incorporate White Hat elements into each page as it is constructed; there are never additional fees.