why a white hat?

A white hat goes back to cowboys, good guys had white hats and bad guys had black hats. Good guys working in SEO will be sure to only use ethical means to get you a high page rank in Google or Yahoo. Using Black Hat tricks and tatics can result in Google, MSN, Yahoo and others banning your site from their listing. If you have a site to make money, you need to have a high listing on these search engines.

A Search Engine (in case you didn't know) is just a tool used to find information. Google is the example that people know best and you have probably heard the phrase "I googled it" which means someone searched on google.com to find information. Oddly, people assume that if it is on Google, it has to be true.

What a search engine does (or the bit of software they have running does) is to go out and look at page layout and 'special' source words and links to and from a site to determine the importance page. Since people like me know what a search engine is looking for we can modify a site to have words in the proper area & sequence and perfom magic with pictures, links, advertisements and blogs. Right now the most expensive way to get people to a site is to get it ranked high in google and people will buy the right to link words of phrases to their site. If I had the money and time I could make any search for a word or phrase point to my site even if I had nothign to do with that subject. Same in reverse, if you have enough money you can find a way to point people to your site.

People, like me, work on their own site or clients sites to boost their rankings in search engines. We do this by using the right content and having the site of most interest for the subject in question. This is White Hat SEO.

Black Hat SEO is using tricks to get a top rating. I have 2 clients that wanted a #1 Google rating and I got it for them, although they did not last because they did not have the right content to keep themselves there.

To have a good page rank you have to start using specific keyword rich page titles, headers, subheaders, and CONTENT. Content is King! Your content has to be logical and use your keywords in real English (or French or whatever you happen to write in).

I won't tell you the site by name, but one real estate agent had the keyword phrase "Eastern Washington's Best Real Estate Agents" and then did not use those words on their home page. Then every single sub page was entitled Untitled when they could have used:

• Eastern Washington's Best Real Estate Agents Home Page
• Eastern Washington's Best Real Estate Agents Best Deals
• Eastern Washington's Best Real Estate Agents Quick sales specials
• Eastern Washington's Best Real Estate Agents contact page
• Eastern Washington's Best Real Estate Agents community support program

Hope you get the idea, use key words where they count the most and titles are really important.

One way to get a higher site rank is to have a real link building campaign. Real links are when someoen likes your site enough to link to it, and you don't want them to list http://www.blah.con/ but Eastern Washington's Best Real Estate Agents (yes, these last 2 links don't work by choice) where your www is hidden from the internauts view and they only see your keyword or phrase. Most links using a variation of the keyword phrases are hard to get because people pointing to you may not know (or care about) your keywords.