White Hat vs Black Hat SEO
Search engine optimization has been at the heart of professional website design for years, for an obvious reason: boosting a website’s visibility to search engines is one of the most effective ways to make sure it gets seen by potential customers. But the world of SEO is changing fast, and not all techniques are created equal.
It’s not unusual to hear search techniques divided into two camps, “black hat seo” and “white hat seo.” 
The difference between these techniques is about what a reader could expect: Black hat techniques are, generally speaking, tactics that try to manipulate search engines into promoting a site whose content may not deserve it, while white hat SEO is about making sure that search engines can recognize the content a website actually has.
As the name implies, white hat SEO has a more favorable reputation, and represents a company’s best bet. We discuss the various avenues to a strong white hat effort in our free ebook on website redesign, but the basics are fairly simple: A site that fills its pages with well-written, strongly presented information that a potential customer is likely to appreciated, and then reinforces that information using the site’s behind-the-scenes architecture, has created a strong white hat website.
Search engines reward a number of factors when they are determining website rankings, including the frequency of keywords similar to those used in the search, the number of reputable websites linking to the page in question, and how recently the website was updated. Blogs have become one of the most useful elements of white hat SEO because it can help to satisfy all three of these conditions, by providing fresh content that relates to the company’s business and drawing attention from readers. It is also important to ensure that the website’s meta text reinforces the information being presented for readers to see.
Black hat SEO are usually designed to take advantage of these same criteria. However, instead of building a site that should actually be appealing to readers, black hat techniques are focused on finding shortcuts that manipulate the way search engines work. Keyword stuffing, a popular strategy during the last decade, involved web designers filling their websites’ pages with strings of high-value keywords, creating text that a reader would view as practically gibberish but that was designed to get search engines’ attention. Another technique took advantage of search engines’ attention to links by arranging for several websites to link to each other just to improve their search rankings.
This approach is generally not popular with viewers, who can feel tricked into visiting an unhelpful website thanks to misleading information, and search companies are constantly developing new techniques to build smarter engines that can see through black hat techniques. For that reason, black hat SEO can be a doubly serious misstep, as it can give a company a bad reputation among online visitors and prove ineffective as search engines improve.
White hat SEO’s disadvantage is that building and maintaining a high-quality website takes some work. However, an optimized white hat site is more likely to feature information that a visitor will appreciate once they have actually reached the site, and is therefore more effective at generating actual business. Not only is the work more likely to be rewarded with more viewers and higher search rankings than a black hat strategy, but the inbound marketing model that SEO plays a part in remains tremendously cheaper and more effective than the old direct advertising techniques that came before it. And when it comes to building a sustainable website, there is practically no comparison.