White-Hat

"White-Hat" Strategies

Added from the following source: Marketing Profs -- Many additions exist which differ strongly from the original.

White-Hat Mindset and Description

The White hatter is one who believes in ethics as well as hard work. They don't think through things in the same way that a black-hat marketer would think. They think in time and the building of an asset (their website(s) with content). In some views, this would be flawed, but White-hatters look for ways to use the good of internet marketing including the making of real people/profile(s) with truthful/honest relationships. They will only use tactics consistent with the norm and consistent with the innovative in order to stay ahead of the game.

For example, if a white-hatter would use MySpace for marketing, they would make a profile with a real person or their business entity. What they would do after this would consist of getting content out to the communities followed by the building of one's business profile. Most White-hatters would not use a social bot to build their profile membership and would only use other traffic streams. The reason for an individual not using a bot to automate these tasks mainly has to do with one's ethical boundaries. The breaking of this tactic with using a bot would be the darker side of white-hat marketing. The truth to the matter, is that white-hatters would only receive traffic through word of mouth from their 25+ friend additions per day (this is if they were using a bot / if they had someone adding friends all day (they would also be capable of manually bypassing the CAPTCHAwhich would increase the amount of potential friend requests to around 100/200 friends daily)).

Usually, innovative strategies have to take place on MySpace or a person needs to have a brand building strategy in place in order to drive traffic and build a membership to their MySpace profile (people on MySpace also like cool ideas and cultural actions, which eventually catch on fire in a viral way, in order to also build membership of a business/individual MySpace profile). The grey-hatters are the ones who would traverse more towards the black-hat side of internet marketing; the techniques used would be consistent with automation, as well as the building of many profiles used to build friend requests to a central profile. Look at MySpace Marketing in order to see this "chaining" technique in action.

The Attributes of White-Hat Marketing & SEO (According to the Chart Above)

The White-hatter is one who follows all the rules and remains highly ethical regardless of the profit potential for using the other "unethical" techniques. Usually due to the idea of remaining ethical, one must deal with a lengthy process of search engine indexing and ranking. In order to speed up one's indexing and ranking process, one must be able to present content that is known to better than the normal content out there, possibly even producing the best content for their own one's niche. The key to all strategies for a white hatter is the strategy of present content, with the content being king/life-blood in a White-hatter's world; as well as the use of links for increasing the possibilities for the rankings of the site as well as the natural popularity of one's own site.

For the professional White-Hat SEOs, the indexing time of their sites may be within 1-3 months. In order for this to happen, many ranking factors must come into play. The more positive the SEO factors, the faster indexing time will exist. The older the domain name, the more it helps; The more content produced, the more authoritative the site is, etc. -- Look at Search Engine Optimization to learn more, including the section on Link-building

The final attribute of a White-Hatter states that: a White-hatter relies on content building and marketing in order to achieve higher rankings as well as the placement of their brand in the scheme/arena of their niche (their market/where they compete in order to profit). The content building may sometimes be done with cheap labor through the use of such avenues as CraigsList, eLance, etc. Other times, the content may be created in-house and written extremely well in order to show a level of personality, knowledge and professionalism. The marketing aspect takes place on the level of advertising through SEM (Google AdWords / Yahoo Overture), SMO as well as the traditional forms of advertising. The marketing and the content writing are keys to a White-Hatter's success and in this arena, their expertise must suffice in order to bring the traffic.

The formula is: Content leads to the traffic which the traffic is PreSold by the content, which ultimately leads to monetization. (Content --> Traffic --> PreSell --> Monetization or CTPM for short).

"White-hat" Tactics with SEO

An SEO tactic, technique or method is considered "White hat" if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and/or involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White Hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.

White Hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to their spiders, rather than game the system. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical.