Knowing exactly what is white hat SEO may be an order taller than most people have bargained for. White hat SEO, in a nutshell, is an ethical means to get a higher ranking in search engine query results. There are various ways to do this, and the line between "ethical" and "unethical" SEO is fast becoming blurry. The query, "What is white hat SEO?" may not be so much about following search engine guidelines as it is about determining the "target audience" of the website content.  

Is it for humans, or machine?

To discern what is white hat SEO from what is not entails a lot of critical analysis, and let�s face it, guess work. The reason why most black hat or unethical SEO methods continue to be used is because it's not clearly identified as illegal means to begin with. All search engine companies can do for now is to ban domains and websites which use blatant black hat SEO methods. There are three black hat SEO methods which can be easily recognized and these are keyword stuffing, using invisible links, and using doorway pages.

Whether or not the methods which do not fall under the three categories could be called white hat SEO is still uncertain. The only thing that's certain is that web content which is written more for human benefits than search engine spidering is considered white hat SEO. These web articles may use some keywords, but they do so without distorting the information that's found on the text of the article.

It is also understood that white hat SEO uses information that is directly relevant to the search engine query. Since this is an issue on communication and knowledge, it naturally follows that white hat SEO won't try to trick search engines by using keywords which have nothing to do with the its main content.  

Why it's still better to use white hat SEO methods instead of black hat SEO techniques

White hat SEO methods take more effort to compose compared to black hat SEO content, which is mainly made up of irrelevant gibberish. Although black hat SEO techniques may produce results faster than white hat SEO content, once a black hat SEO method is discovered, it could cause a domain to be banned from the search engine permanently.

Most black hat SEO content engineers also make the mistake of producing ugly, unreadable content. Remember, the point of making your website rank higher on search engines is to attract more readers to your website. Once visitors get a glimpse of gibberish or sloppily written content, they will naturally move away from your page again. You will be wasting precious bandwidth by producing not just bad website content, but gibberish which do you nor the other search engine users any good.    

Why patience will pay off in the long run

It will take some time before web content using white hat SEO methods get spidered by most search engines. This is precisely because most web content makes use of black hat SEO methods which eventually clog up the traffic of most search engines.

However, using white hat SEO techniques will gain you appreciative guests which will most likely link your web content and web page to their own web sites. The fight against black hat SEO techniques may be a long and grueling one, but it will eventually pay off in the future as the information highway clears itself of garbage information. Hopefully, content writing for the internet would someday reach the standards of most journalistic modes of writing seen in print.