In the physical world, humans always encounter two paths to walk on - right and wrong. Drawing analogy in the digital world, white hat SEO falls on the right path of boosting organic rankings, while black hat SEO falls on the wrong path of boosting rankings. Often, digital marketers are leached away by black hat SEO techniques to produce quick high ranking results for their websites. This leads to the downfall of the website in the long run.

Usage of white hat SEO depends on the brand’s goals too. If a brand wants to build a long-term customer base and loyalty, then white hat is the way to go. If a brand wants to go the ‘quick and spam’ way to acquire customer base, then black hat SEO is the way to go. But it comes with its own set of implications (mostly negative).

Having highlighted that, white hat SEO is the only path SEO experts should follow to maintain trust, credibility and goodwill in the books of the search engines. White hat SEO simple refers to search engine optimization strategies and techniques that align with the policies and guidelines laid down by Google and other search engines. A good rule abiding website will not only win goody cookies from Google, but will also enhance user experience, in turn improving traffic. Let’s explore some commonly used white hat SEO techniques of the digital world that help in doubling traffic.

1. Mobile First Indexing

The meaning is simple as the name suggests. Google’s recent algorithm change indexes websites starting from the mobile usability and experience. About 70% of users are now on mobile devices than desktops. A bad mobile user experience will result in higher exit rates of users and trigger an alarm in the search engine’s shop.

2. Keyword Research

With the availability of key keyword research tools like Moz, Ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner, Uber Suggest, incorporating thoroughly researched search terms in website content and back end HTML is crucial for a rich user experience.

3. High Pedigree Backlinks

Good domain authority websites are helpful in providing quality traffic back to websites. A low DA website will not only drive bad and low traffic, but will also affect the quality score of the website, leading to fall in DA and search engine result page rankings of that website.

4. On-Page Optimization

A website audit will give insights and recommendations to level up the on-page SEO game of a website. A highly optimized website, to name a few, will have the following parameters in place - text to html ratio, favicon, sitemap, schema, robots.txt, custom 404 page, 301 redirect, keywords, title, ALT attributes, page speed, descriptions, meta tags, canonical URL. Google Webmaster is a website auditing tool, which helps in identifying and fixing errors to avoid penalties.

5. Quality Original Content

As Google penalizes duplicate content, having unique content across webpages is a must. In this world laden with plagiarisers and copy cats, being original is the real deal. A canonical URL helps in identifying the source of the original content and helps Google tin taking down duplicate content.

6. Natural Keyword Density

As opposed to keyword stuffing, this technique does wonders to the website ranking. A mix of 5-6 keywords over webpage is an optimal keyword density figure. Researching keywords highly relevant to the content can help in better ranking, leading to high traffic drive.

7. Avoiding Black Hat SEO Techniques

Does it need more explanation? Abiding by the rules set by Google and doing away with bad SEO practices will automatically make room for quality traffic, rise in domain authority and subsequent top positions in search engine result pages.