The story of White Hat vs. Black Hat search engine optimization is the very story of search engine optimization itself. From the moment when business owners realized that where their website landed in search engine rankings had a direct impact on their traffic and sales, SEO was born and so were White Hat and Black Hat companies.

In its earliest days, SEO was akin to the Western movies. There were the “good guys” wearing white hats and the “bad guys” wearing black hats and it was not too difficult to distinguish between the two.

Black Hat website traffic promotions were full of empty promises, loud come-ons and questionable opportunists who all shared the same features: a lack of scruples; poor writing skills and an unyielding desire to make a fast buck and disappear.

Using the new technology to their advantage, Black Hat marketers looked for loopholes and quick solutions rather than legitimate techniques and long-term solutions in order to get clients a quick jump in the rankings, regardless of how short-lived the boost was.

Overseas marketers flooded the Internet with promises of high rankings and some of them were even able to deliver those rankings until the search engines discovered their SPAM techniques, penalized or banned the websites and left the website owner with little or no recourse.

The price for the quick fix techniques used by Black Hat marketers have left many companies with poor rankings or banned websites, effectively cutting them out of the $250 billion e-commerce industry.

White Hat services refer to e-Marketing and SEO services that use only legitimate techniques to achieve high rankings for clients. Search engines, including Google and Yahoo have consistently rewarded White Hat services with high rankings, while penalizing websites that use black hat techniques.

The search engines may all have different formulas to determine the rankings of websites, but they all take optimization techniques seriously and penalize and ban improper optimization and reward proper, White Hat optimization.

All the search engines have different formulas or algorithms to determine how to rank a website when someone does a search. Though the formula differs from search engine to search engine, one thing is true of all of them – all search engines consider meta and title tags, internal and external links and content.

Some SEO firms are nothing more than a meta tags optimization service. Though optimizing meta tags is an important aspect of SEO, it is only one of the three primary prongs for effective optimization.

White Hat and Black Hat SEO firms will approach meta tags optimization differently. Whereas White Hat firms ensure that there is a logical correlation between the meta tags being used and the content on the webpage, Black Hat firms blur these lines or ignore these lines and the result is often a quick climb up the rankings, than a skyrocketing decline in the rankings.

The keywords used to optimize a webpage should be related to the content on the page. The keywords should not be used excessively or many of the search engines will penalize the website resulting in a significant decrease or complete elimination of website traffic.

The links within your website, as well as the links to and from your website are all factored into search engine rankings. While Black Hat firms promise huge link campaigns with promises of first page rankings, White Hat firms know that improper or overly aggressive link campaigns will ultimately result in a website being penalized or banned by Google, Yahoo and the other major search engines.

An effective link campaign must be planned and implemented using legitimate techniques…in short, White Hat techniques in order to drive a website up the rankings safely and effectively.

Black Hat firms are notorious for using link farms and other shortcuts, while White Hat Marketing crafts a link campaign and has a trained staff execute the campaign without using automated software or link farms.

Content has always and will always be King…and the King wears a white crown. It is typically easy to find black hat SEO firms, their content is usually poorly written with improper grammar and an overuse of keywords.

As the search engines calculate the keyword percentage, these sites often begin to slip and then nose dive in the rankings for having SPAM content.

White Hat firms create optimized content that is relevant and well written. With two audiences in mind: search engines and Internet users, website content writers must have a strong grasp of the language and of how to properly use content to improve rankings.

Though White Hat firms have a proven track record of success, many website owners still fall prey to Black Hat firms that make promises they are unable to keep and use techniques that will result in sites being penalized or banned.

Any company or person looking for high rankings using only legitimate techniques should put on a white hat and enjoy watching their website climb the search engine rankings.