Starting in the mid-1990’s, webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines. In the beginning, site owners only needed to submit the URL of their website to the various search engines which would send a spider to crawl the page and extract the meta tags and links to other pages. Links were in turn crawled by the spider to index the entire website. Meta tags provide list of keywords describing the content of the page. Early versions of search algorithms relied on these webmaster supplied keywords to provide the link between the searched term and the results page.

Since the success and popularity of a search engine is determined by its ability in providing the most relevant results to any given search, using meta data tags was soon found to be less than reliable because the webmasters choice and density of keywords could be manipulated to provide an inaccurate representation of the sites actual content.  Soon search engines responded by developing smarter spiders and more complex ranking algorithms that were more difficult for the content providers to manipulate.   About this same time, content owners started to recognise the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results, thus creating the ever evolving techniques for both white hat and black hat SEO practices.

White hat SEO can be classified as any technique that conforms to the search engine guidelines and involves no deception.  The search engine guidelines are not meant to be a series of rules or commandments, but a practice of good design. White hat SEO is about creating content for the users and not for the search engines, while providing content that is easily and properly indexed by the spiders. White hat SEO produces long lasting, relevant search results that bring intended traffic to your website.

Black hat SEO can be classified as any technique that attempts to improve rankings by deception or techniques that are disapproved by the search engines.  Black hat SEO usually involves content that is not seen by the user. Some examples are hidden text that is coloured the same as the background, positioned off screen or hidden in a special HTML tag. Cloaking is a term used for displaying one set of content for users and a different set of content to be indexed by the search engine. Search engines can, and do, penalize websites that practice black hat SEO. Penalties can be a lesser page rank or the removal from the search engine results altogether.

Proper design and content writing is the first step to ensure best practices and relevant results of referrals from search engines. Develop your website to be relevant to your industry and write engaging content that is informational and industry specific and the search engines will rank you accordingly.