An SEO tactic, technique or method is considered "White hat" if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception either directed at potential visitors or the search engines.

As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note.

White Hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.

White Hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then make that content easily accessible to their spiders, rather than game the system. In many ways, white hat SEO is very similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical.