Pure white hat SEO
As I mentioned in an article about white hat SEO, the only "pure" white hat SEO are on-page SEO because ideally, others should be linking to you on their own accord.
The pure white hat SEO are techniques based on the recommendation of search engines, which in turn is based on their ideals on how the web should work. For search engines, the best thing a webmaster can do is to produce quality and original content and if it's seen as an important reference, people will link to it on their own. No attempts are being made in cracking how search engine algorithm works.
Following pure white hat ensures that you never get banned in search engines even though the increase in your website's traffic can be really slow. Some of the pure white hat SEO techniques are discussed below.
Original, unique and high quality content
Perhaps, the single best thing that a webmaster can do is to provide a unique, original and high quality content for his or her website. In most cases, providing unique content on a regularly updated website white sustaining it over a period of at least one year is the easiest and most effective search engine optimization technique that anyone can do. This is the main reason why blogs and wikis (and sometimes forums) can frequently top the search results.The adjectives original and unique pertains to the avoidance of duplicate content issues. You see, search engine hates two or more websites having exactly the same content. If there are two or more websites containing the same article or post, search engines will show only one of them. I do not know what are factors that they use to determine which one to show but the only thing I am certain is that you can avoid this by having an original and unique content.Having an original content means you write the content on your own. The ideas of the content may not be original but they should be expressed in your own way. Do not copy articles from the internet, even if it's fine with the authors of those articles if your intention is to rank high in SERP (search engine result page). It is not a matter of copyright, it's a matter of logic. It does not make sense for search engines to show pages with exactly the same content in their results so they pick only one.
If having original content means you shall not copy, having unique content means keeping the content the one and only in the internet. You need to ensure that each article or post has no copy on other sites e.g., don't copy the entire content of one of your web pages and post it in forum or submit it in article submission sites. In case of forums, you quote only one or two paragraph. For article submission, you should write another set of articles only for that purpose.You also need to ensure that there are no duplicate content within the site e.g., if you're website is a blog, don't let the whole post appear in its own post page, in the category page, home page, etc. If you are using WordPress, use the post excerpt or the "read more" tag.
As for high quality, the standards of quality can vary from one person to another and from one discipline to another. For example, scientific articles tend to avoid the use of singular first person pronouns like I, me, my, etc, resulting in lots of passive sentences. For communication experts, having lots of passive sentences are bad quality. This shows that the standards of quality really depends on your topic and your target audience.
Despite the disagreement on what constitutes a quality content, many people will agree that autogenerated random gibberish called splogs are at the very bottom in terms of low quality. Technically, the content of splogs are unique (search engines will not see it as duplicate content) because they are using bots to harvest random phrases from different blogs. However, the results are usually random trash that does not make any sense.Writing quality content is a must because it is the only reason for people to be interested in linking to your site. Usually, they will link to the page containing the said article and not to the home page, but this is usually suffucient (and even recommended) for your site because search engines do not always display the main page, only the pages that matched the search queries.
Make the job easy for search engine crawlers
Aside form having an original, unique and quality content, the other thing that you need to ensure is that the search engine crawlers (also called spiders or robots) will be able to find your content. This means structuring your website in a way that makes the crawlers' job easier and avoiding things that prevents them from indexing your site.I suppose most website designers and developers already know, but I still see a handful of websites that put a huge bulk of text in the image file. Don't put text in the image file. Search engines will not be able to read those words and therefore will not associate your website with those words. If there is really a need for you to put text in the image, copy that text and place it in the alt attribute of the image.Aside from text on image, you should avoid creating pure flash websites. In pure flash websites, the entirety of the website is in the embedded SWF file. When you check the source code, you will not be able to see any content. Search engines sees the website in a way you see the source code. It cannot see the content and therefore, it will not associate the website with the words in that content.
There's a recent update in Google (recent, as in around 9 months from the time I published this post) that enables the Google crawler to read the text in flash. However, the way it works is still erratic. Lone SWF files appear in search results instead of the actual webpage on which this SWF file is embedded. Moreover, flash files take some time to download.
Finally, you should not clutter your header section, put your CSS codes and Javascripts in external files. The logic here is that search engine crawlers examines a webpage from top to bottom. The earlier they can see the content, the better. It will be more difficult if they have to dig through long Javascripts and CSS codes in the header before finding content that they can index.
White hat SEO with potential for abuse
On the other hand, there are these gray areas of white hat SEO. Should we call them gray hat instead? Nah! Let's not make our SEO classification scheme more complicated. We can just call them white hat if used in a proper manner but when abused, these techniques can be considered blackhat.
Including keywords in title tag and in header tags <h1>, <h2>, <h3>,...
Including keywords in image title and alt attributes.
Of course, including your keywords in the content and highlighting them with bold/strong or italics/emp tags (<b>/<strong> or <i>/<em>)
In using these techniques, you need to be more careful, discreet and less aggressive. Allow me to explain when each of these white hat techniques jumps above the fence to the black hat's side.
Title and header tags In deciding what to put in the title tag, well as it's name imply, you should put the title of your article, which is usually the same as the one you put on top and enclosed by <h1> and </h1> tags. Another way of doing that is to write an alternative title for your content that will allow you to capture the keywords related to your content but are not captured by the original title. Essentially, your content will have two titles, one for the title tag and the other for the header tag.
These titles should be short as the title of a typical article, as well as coherent for humans reading them. Avoid writing spammy titles like "keyword 1, keyphrase 2, keyword 3". Note that as of the publishing date of this post, I haven't heard any website banned by search engines for using spammy titles. However, there are practical reasons for not using spammy titles as discussed in this earlier article: Search engine optimization of HTML title tags
Alt and title attributes
For the alt and title attributes, do not fill them with keywords. A simple rule that you can use is that alt attribute describes the image as is, while the title attribute (used as tooltip) should describe the image in relation to the topic being presented. Write alt and title this way and your keywords should come naturally. Forcing so many keywords in this attribute constitutes keyword stuffing, which is definitely a black hat SEO technique.I already experienced being penalized by Google for stuffing keywords in image alt attribute. Fortunately, I no longer need to use that website and thus, I just decided to take it down. Check this article for the proper use of alt and title attributes in SEO
Natural keywords in content
Write content the natural way, like how you would write a thesis, a research paper, a diary entry, etc. If your topic is about "something", then the word "something" will definitely come up a few times within the article.
You need to worry neither of high keyword density nor not being able to include your target keywords. However, replacing some instances of some recurring keywords with their synonyms can be helpful because some people might be searching these synonyms instead of the word that you expect them to search.
Making some of the keywords bold or italics (or strong or emphasized) definitely have some merits in SEO. These words are seen by search engines as important for the overall context of the article/content.
However, you should bold or italicized only one instance (maybe the first) of a particular targetted keyword or keyphrase. If you bold/italize every instance of the targetted keyword or keyphrase in the page, search engine might see it as spamming. Moreover, too many bolded texts is a pain in the eye of human visitors.
Conclusion
Virtually all search engine optimization techniques recommended by Google and other search engines are on-page white hat; ethical, not deceptive and involves only tweaking the content and structure of your site. Content and site structure are the two most important variables that you can tweak to make your website search engine friendly.In using the title and header tags, moderation is needed. Use short and coherent titles, not spammy and keyword stuffed ones.
In writing content, just write in a natural way and your target keywords will automatically come. You can highlight them by making them bold or italics to emphasize their importance but you should not emphasize a keyword or a keyphrase several times.
