You may have come across some pretty strange terms in reference to SEO. Two of these terms are black hat SEO and white hat SEO. If you look at the terms metaphorically, you can probably figure out the difference between the two.
Black hat SEO is a term used in relation to unethical SEO practices. Unethical SEO tactics are those which are highly frowned upon by the search engines. People use black hat SEO to spam the search engines and try to gain an unfair advantage in the search engine results.
Some of the tactics which are used in black hat SEO are; using doorway pages, spamming the search engine submission process, keyword stuffing, cloaking and using automated programs to create link farms.
Why are those methods considered unethical? Search engines value placing websites with quality content and important information in the top of the search engine results. Unethical SEO tactics can get websites which are little to no importance placed in the top of the results. Most of these websites which use black hate SEO tactics are put on the Internet to spam people or make money off of unknowing users.
White hat SEO is the opposite of black hat SEO. White hat SEO uses ethical techniques to get a website moved high up in the search engine results. These methods include; good website design, proper html code, quality content, quality keywords, proper keyword density and inbound links.
When a website is designed correctly using white hat SEO, search engines feel these websites are valuable and important websites that should be easy to find. Of course you can have a properly optimized website which is still pretty buried, but that could be due to the market that your website is competing in as well.
White hat SEO is looked upon by the search engines as acceptable and ethical. Using black hat SEO on the other hand can actually get your website penalized or all together banned by the search engines. One of the number one reasons why websites get banned from the search engines is due to the use of black hat SEO tactics.