Search Engines have guidelines that guide both what they look for on a site and what we should be doing to help them rank our website better.  The most commonly used Webmaster Guidelines are Google’s webmaster guidelines.  Webmaster Guidelines are the terms of service of the search engines.  Complying with these guidelines when working on the search engine optimisation of website constitutes white hat SEO.

What constitutes White Hat SEO are the items within these Guidelines which are recommended and approved of by the search engines. 

Some of these white hat techniques include:

• Link building. Creating a mix of one way, three way and reciprocal linking with regular link building taking place – not 1 million links in the first month.  This link building does not include link buying.
• On-page optimisation of content, including keyword rich navigation, title tags and meta information
• Article and press release submission

Black Hat SEO looks for loop holes in these guidelines and areas where they can be pushed.  Black Hat SEO opens a website to potential penalties and breaking the search engine terms of service as set out in the guidelines.

Some of these black hat techniques include:

• Cloaking (including using the CSS to create copy that a visitor can never see)
• Doorway Pages
• Link Buying
• Keyword stuffing your on-page optimisation

As a general rule Black Hat SEO provides quick short term results but does not pay websites in the long term, as once penalties are in place they are hard to remove.  Black Hat SEO is constantly being addressed by Search Engines when they update their algorithms.  Algorithmic changes have resulted in drops in rankings for people using hidden text and buying links.

Good SEO for your website is about enabling your website to rank well and drive traffic for you.  Using Black Hat SEO techniques can result in penalties and should be avoided, to save yourself less hassle in the long term.