Talk of white hats brings to mind cricket, the man from Del Monte and the Lone Ranger.

In the world of Search Engine Optimsation, “White Hat” is an umbrella term used to describe legitimate techniques for gaining rankings. This generally means ensuring that your site is choc-full of relevant content that is updated on a regular basis. It means ensuring that your site is visible to the search engines’ spiders and that every page can be cached. This is achieved through well planned design that sticks to some established SEO principles.

At Upstream Connections, we use only White Hat techniques to get top results for our clients. Fortunately, this offers us a great array of opportunities to be creative! It is probably easier to list a few things that Upstream Connections, or any SEO worth their salt, would never dabble with:

Link Farms. Spammy spammy spammy. Basically, you can purchase thousands of links from websites that only exist for SEO purposes. Google will promptly ignore these links, and probably give you a shunt down the listings for good measure.

Doorway Pages. Again, these are spamilicious pages which are stuffed with keywords. You will rarely actually  see one as you are instantly redirected to the real front page of a site. BMW hit the headlines a couple of years ago when their website disappeared from Google’s results.

Keyword Stuffing.  Amazingly, you will still find websites that are stuffed full of hundreds of keywords, misspellings and all. White Hat SEO involves making sure that the right keywords appear in the right places, Black Hat SEO generally involves cramming the words in there in text which is all but invisible.

Link Spam. Not all links are good links. Did you know that inbound links to your site from the wrong places can actually damage your site’s performance in natural search?

White Hat SEO means ensuring that visitors to your site see the  same site as the search engines. Google and the other search engines aim to offer the best possible results to their users, and rightly punish those seen to be abusing this service.

At Upstream Connections, we would never do anything to threaten our clients results. Yes, our work takes time and results are not achieved over night, but if you are online for the long haul, you will need an SEO partner with the same long term vision. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, drop us a line.