The difference between black hat SEO and white hat SEO has to do with the techniques used when trying to improve a website’s search engine ranking.
Black Hat SEO
Black hat SEO refers to techniques and strategies used to get higher search rankings, usually by breaking search engine rules. Black hat SEO focuses on only search engines and not so much a human audience. These techniques include: keyword stuffing, link farming, hidden texts and links, and blog content spamming. Consequences of black hat SEO can possibly result in your site being banned from a search engine and de-indexed as a penalization for using unethical techniques. Check out this article on JC Penny’s Blackhat Experience.
White Hat SEO
White hat SEO refers to the use of techniques and strategies that target a human audience opposed to a search engine. Techniques that are typically used in white hat SEO include using keywords, and keyword analysis, doing research, rewriting meta tags in order for them to be more relevant, backlinking, link building as well as writing content for human readers. Those who use white hat SEO expect to make a long-term investment on their website, as the results last a long time.
If you are looking for a good approach, we recommend creating quality content as that is important because it shows the search engines that your site is unique and appropriate to display. Researching keywords that are both short and long tail and are relevant to your site is necessary to do as well. Be sure to include keywords naturally in headings, link anchor texts and page titles. Furthermore, it is important to add new relevant content regularly. The more content-rich your site is, the better as it will appear to be more valuable to the search engines, human visitors and webmasters who would most likely link to your site. Although creating quality content may be time consuming, it will be well worth it in the long run.