by Sheri Fink

Created on: February 11, 2007   Last Updated: April 19, 2007

You may have heard about "black hat" and "white hat" techniques to optimize your website for search engine results. Using the wrong types of techniques can result in getting your website banned from the major search engines. Here's a quick overview of the differences:

Black Hat SEO
Black hat SEO consists of illegal or unethical techniques used to get higher search rankings. Black hat techniques to avoid in your search engine optimization include:

1 - Keyword stuffing: Packing long lists of irrelevant keywords into a site.
2 - Invisible text: Putting keywords in the same color as the background (ie: white text on a white background).
3 - Doorway pages: Webpages made specifically to rank well in search engines for particular keywords, serving as an entry point that redirects the user to the actual webpage.

White Hat SEO
White hat SEO consists of ethical techniques that focus on content and user-oriented improvements to a website in order to obtain higher search rankings. A few examples of white hat techniques include:

1 - Keyword-rich content: Including relevant articles and topics on a site that feature the keywords that users will search in order to find your website.
2 - Keyword-rich page title: Writing page titles that use keywords to accurately describe the content on your webpage. This also helps users identify the content of the webpage in search engine results.

The terms "black hat" and "white hat" originate from old Western movies, where heroes often wore white hats and the "bad guys" wore black hats.

Search engines have stated that they will not tolerate any deceptive attempts to manipulate searches using black hat techniques. It is important to play by the rules and only use white hat SEO techniques. Even top companies are not immume from the penalties imposed on sites that use black hat tactics.

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