White hat / Black hat SEO.

White hat SEO means to use honest tactics to improve your positions in the search results. These tactics include many things webmasters might reasonably do to their site if they were not trying to improve their positioning.  Adding text to alt tags for example is something a good html program might do automatically. You won’t get punished for that. Getting links to your site is something that can happen naturally over time. You won’t get punished for that either. So what’s frowned upon?

Black Hat SEO – How do you know what to avoid?

Black hat SEO tactics involve manipulating your site so that you can trick the search engines into elevating your rankings. Some black hat tactics include cloaking, hidden links, keyword stuffing, link spam and more. There really aren’t very many good reasons to use Black Hat tactics anymore. The penalty is not a legal one, it’s more financial. To rank well at google and then to drop out of sight is a devistating blow to traffic and sales. Google will weight your site down or ban your domain name altogether if it gets wind of these kinds of tactics. Competitors will turn you in in a milisecond if they discover you too. The white hat process is pretty straight forward. Still though, there are many webmasters out there trying to setup get rich quick type websites. It is mostly these people that employ these tactics. Lets take a look at each of the 4 items listed here.

• Cloaking – A lot of websites out there are handcuffed by their templates. Headline text must go in a certain place. Navigation must go in another place. But what can you do if you want to rearrange your code so that Google sees your keyword phrases at the top of your content instead of in the middle? And what if you could add more keyword phrases into your content so that your customers couldn’t see it but google could? You might be thinking you’d be better off giving Google a different page than your visitors see. It is entirely posisble to program your server code to examine the request for content and deliver page A to one crowd (real people) and Page B to the other (search spiders). This is called cloaking. There are quite a few companies out there selling scripts that will do this for you.
• Hidden links – There are a few ways to hide links on a page. The main one is to turn the links the same color as the background. Another way is to put links on a layer and offset the layer into the upper left area of the page. Using negative numbers, you can push it out of the visible area of the page. It used to be that the more links you had on the page, the better. That’s why this came about. Just another decpetive tactic to get your site banned.
  
• Keyword Stuffing – The same with hidden links. Over stuffing your meta tags or your pages plain text content has an adverse affect on its ranking. 3-5 keyword phrases is ok. 100 is not. SEO pros will tinker with the number and placement of keyword phrases, but if you’ve hired an SEO pro who’s adding them at a rate closer to the 100 mark than the 3-5 mark, you probably picked the wrong guy.
  
• Link Spam – This drives every webmaster crazy. Webmasters with message boards and blogs are pounded daily with automated scripts designed to post random messages. These random messages contain links to pharmaceutical oriented websites that sell the latest and greatest thing. Many contain links to pornographic and gambling sites. Most of them are links to websites hosted in other countries. It used to be that these automated scripts posted messages that were not approved by the webmaster, so the webmaster had the daily job of removing them one by one, or just letting them exist because there were just too many to keep up with. Today’s software is a lot better at resisting this now, but it’s probably only temporary.
  You don’t need automated scripts to leave link spam on a message board. People are hired every day (Usually foreigners) to leaving messages on boards with links back to sites. That doesn’t mean it’s spam, but it has to be done right in order to not look like spam. The message that’s left needs to be part of the discussion that’s already there. A message thread discussing the cost of buying groceries would be an appropriate place to leave a link if you were running a grocery coupon type site if you can work it into the discussion naturally. You wouldn’t say “hey try my site at xxx.xxxx.com”. Your links will appear more natural if you start your message with something like “hi Harry. Sorry you’re having a hard time. I use the coupons from xxx.xxxx.com when I shop and I save oogles.” Since you’ve contributed to the conversation, your link will probably remain and no one can safely say that it was ONLY there for link purposes.