What Is White Hat SEO? – Forbes Advisor – Technologist

When looking to enhance your search engine ranking, you can use several simple white hat SEO techniques. Some of these are broken down below.

1. Offer High-value Content

Creating high-quality content is one of the simplest techniques to improve your organic search engine ranking. This means you want to create content and blog posts that are concise, informative and based on up-to-date information.

This content should also be easy to read and skim (particularly for mobile users). Using basic tools, such as Hemingway and Semrush’s SEO Writing Assistant, can help you assess the overall readability of your text.

2. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

Given that almost 60% of website traffic comes from mobile devices, your website must be mobile-friendly to rank highly on search engines. In practice, this means that web pages load quickly and are easy to navigate when using a mobile device.

Search engine providers, such as Google and Bing, offer mobile tests in which you enter your site URL and measure its mobile-friendliness. You can also make your website more mobile-friendly by compressing images, using a larger font, using HTML5 and avoiding pop-ups.

3. Optimize for Keywords

Adding relevant keywords to your website is essential for enabling search engines to route users to content that matches their search intent. You can start optimizing for keywords by conducting research to identify the best keywords to build your content around (ideally those with high traffic and minimal competition).

This includes not only primary keywords but also secondary keywords that occur naturally when discussing a particular topic. This will give you an idea of where to place keywords, such as page titles, body text, H2s and meta descriptions.

Conducting keyword research can be as basic or complex as you want. Smaller companies may opt to use basic tools, such as Google Keyword Planner or Wordstream’s free keyword research tool, to identify potential terms while others may look for more in-depth paid SEO tools and software from providers, such as SEMrush and Ahrefs. There’s also the option to utilize an SEO service that can do all of the work for you.

4. Link Building

Link building is another great technique for drawing traffic to your site and increasing your credibility online. Writing guest posts, articles and other content for websites in your industry or niche can help you to reach a new audience while creating backlinks to your site. Google considers these backlinks as an approval or an endorsement from the other site. If a trustworthy, highly ranked site links to you, your site can be seen as more trustworthy and may rank higher as well.

Ultimately, link building is about networking, so you’ll need to be proactive about emailing potential partners to pitch content they could use for their site. Each successful link acts as a signal that your voice is respected in your industry.

5. Maximize Website Speed

You want to make sure that web pages load as fast as possible. Long loading times can seriously damage your search engine ranking as providers, such as Google, use page load times to help assess the user experience offered by a website.

You can use a web page speed checker to see how fast pages load. If a particular page takes too long to load, look to remove unnecessary plugins and downsize any images used or change to a web server with better performance.

6. Simple Navigation

Lastly, you want to ensure that your site is easy to navigate. The easier it is for users to find the content they want, the longer they’ll stay on your site.

This means you need to invest in your information architecture, designing your website so that content can be organized into categories while providing users with simple menus to locate content, whether on a desktop or mobile device.

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