0 White-hat SEO

White-hat SEO

There are a lot of experts willing to give advice about how to legitimately get your site higher in search engine rankings. When you boil it down, what they're all saying is that the most important thing to do is to build a good site.

"The goal is to be relevant to the user -- and then think about search engine strategy," says Chris Koller, president of IdealGrowth, a digital advertising agency in Dallas.

"Have a differentiator that makes your site compelling and unique," adds Maile Ohye, a Google developer advocate who liaisons with webmasters. "Design it so that users can do what they need to do. Make it accessible to Web crawlers, so they can follow links through the site. And then develop buzz about your site."

"You want to have the most compelling content so people will be inclined to link to you naturally," said Doug Pierce, marketing strategist at Blue Fountain Media in New York. "Also, the URL structure of your site should make sense and have keywords in the page titles."

There are other strategies that can help. Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz, a Seattle-based SEO software firm, suggests using an interlocking array of online marketing, public relations and brand-building activities designed to find the right audience. These methods include producing data-rich blogs of genuine interest to the readers, real conversations on social sites, news bulletins and interesting tweets. The use of infographics, podcasts, webinars, white papers, videos, forums and referring links should not be overlooked, he adds.

Fox has offered a variety of suggestions in blogs and other venues, including the use of text that is not built into graphics or JavaScript routines where a search engine can't see it, the use of descriptive text to accompany videos, and the descriptive use of HTML metatags. Avoid having multiple sites with the same content, since the search engines don't like that, she suggests. Instead, use redirection to cover multiple variations of the site's name. If there is a FAQ, design it around keywords from questions that users have a history of searching for in your topic, as determined through tools like Wordtracker.

A too-optimistic outlook?

Critics complain that such approaches work mostly for topics that are of interest to bloggers, who link to the material. These are the kind of noncontroversial links that boost PageRank ratings. But more obscure topics, while important in their own fields, develop no following from bloggers and so get no links.

There's no getting around the fact that, at least temporarily, black-hat techniques can work -- much to the disgust of more legitimate SEO advisers who are trying to get their sites higher in the search rankings. "Frustration among white-hat SEOs about manipulative sites outranking them is total," says Fishkin. "By the time Google catches up with one site, there's a new one that outranks you."

Aaron Wall, founder of SEO Book, a website devoted to SEO training, says that conventional white-hat methods (he calls them "vanilla methods") do work, but he admits that they work best for sites with little competition, or for large, established sites with high relevancy.

Even then it may take several years and large sums of money to rise to the top, he warns. For sites in competitive fields, the backers must assess what portion of the desired traffic that site is attracting and what portion can realistically be obtained, and gauge their SEO efforts accordingly. There is no simple answer, he says.

"You can succeed without spam. It will take longer and it will be more expensive, but the trade-off is that it should not all come crashing down," Wall says.