Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in three different flavors. They are White Hat, Gray Hat, and Black Hat. White Hat SEO refers to techniques that meet two requirements. First, they are socially acceptable, by that I mean virtually no one is going to accuse you of being “shady” for using a White Hat technique. Second, using a White Hat technique brings with it an extremely low chance of getting your site banned from a search engine.

Understanding White Hat makes it easy to define Black Hat. Black Hat techniques are almost universally considered “shady” and bring with them a serious chance of getting banned from search engine(s) if anyone catches on to what you are doing. Grey Hat as you have probably guessed by now are those SEO techniques that inhabit the middle ground between white and black.

As I journey through life, I have discovered that life it is rarely a matter of dealing with black and white, but rather shades of gray. Life it seems imitates SEO. Most of the people that I would consider successful at employing SEO to greatly leverage there money making power on the web employ what I would consider grey hat techniques.

The thing about all these distinctions is that they are not die cast, carved in stone distinctions, they are somewhat subjective distinctions. Online entrepreneurs have to balance between the potential effectiveness of a SEO technique against the possibility of the negative repercussions that might arise out of using said technique.

What is important to realize is that it is the Search Engines who ultimately act as judge, jury and executioner for their own site. What flies on Yahoo might not fly on Alta Vista, and visa versa.

With that in mind let’s check out some example of White, Grey, and Black Hat techniques. This attempt to give examples is somewhat silly on my part, since the web is after all in a constant state of flux. Six months from now a technique that is widely considered Black Hat may be viewed as grey as new more ethically questionably Black Hat techniques are developed.
                                                                                                                                                                       White Hat

-Contacting a few sites with content related to yours to exchange reciprocal links. In a reciprocal link you link to there site and they link to yours.

-Writing a few articles yourself and submitting them to various article based websites such as ezinearticles.com to create backlinks to your site. A backlink is a one way incoming link to your website.

Grey Hat

-Using article writing software to write 500 articles for you, in your subject area and then using automatic article submitting software to submit those articles to various article submission sites automatically.
                                                                                                                                                                         Black Hat

-Using Invisible Keyword Stuffing to drastically alter your keyword density. Invisible Keyword Stuffing is the practice of embedding text within the HTML of your webpage that cannot be seen by site visitors since it blends into the background color or some other attribute of the layout. Keyword Density refers to ratio of the number of times that your keyword, say “golf bags” appears in your page’s text against the total number of words on one page of your site.
                                                                                                                                                                       These are just a few examples of SEO techniques, a web search of “SEO” or “SEO techniques” should yield many more.