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White hat SEO is working to improve a website’s search engine rankings while complying with search engine rules and guidelines. It’s the opposite of black hat SEO, which is exploiting loopholes in search engine algorithms to undeservedly achieve higher rankings.

White hat SEO strategies typically involve creating helpful content, earning high-quality backlinks, and ensuring the website delivers a great user experience. 

Marketers usually focus on Google Search Essentials. And monitor the latest Google updates to ensure their sites remain compliant.

The term “white hat” comes from Western movies, where heroes typically wore white hats. While villains wore black hats. You may also hear about white hat marketing, white hat hacking, etc.

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White Hat vs. Black Hat SEO: What’s the Difference?

Whether they engage in white hat or black hat strategies, digital marketers want the same thing—to boost their ranking on Google. 

Why are SEO strategists clamoring to make Google’s algorithm happy? Because Google is the most popular search engine worldwide. 

To better understand white hat SEO, it might make sense to examine black hat SEO and understand their key differences, such as:

White hat SEO produces quality content that matches search intent. Black hat strategies put out low-quality, duplicated, or heavily templated content that’s only optimized for search engines.

A white hat strategy includes using well-labeled images with thoughtful alt text. Black hat uses more dated SEO practices, like keyword stuffing and invisible text.

White hat SEO uses keyword research organically on a page. In contrast, black hat SEO takes a target keyword and overuses it in headers, meta tags, or unnatural anchor text throughout a piece of content.