White or black hat

In recent years, the attempt to redirect search results to particular target pages, in a fashion that is against the search engines' terms of service, is often considered unethical search engine optimization (SEO). White hat methods are generally approved by search engines and follow their guidelines. Even though white hats won't always show results in short period of time, they tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing.
Some of the blackhat SEO tactics include: keyword stuffing, hidden text and links, doorway and cloaked pages, link farming and blog comment spam.
White hat marketing
White hat marketing applies the white hat SEO techniques, also known as ethical SEO. The white hat marketing implies that all SEO activities are carried out while conforming to the guidelines, rules and policies of search engines. It is an ethical guideline since all site managers abide to the written, as well as unwritten rules and guidelines for SEO. Some of these guidelines are:
*Providing relevant keywords that cater for short and long tails results
*Updating the content regularly
*Analysing search results analytics reports and take corrective actions as required
*Providing links to other websites as well as requesting other networks to link to this website
Black hat marketing
Black hat marketing involves SEO activities that are against the norms of search engines. It is difficult for the search engine alone to distinguish when black hat SEO is applied. Competitors can play a role by reporting cases of black hat marketing to the search engines, who will in turn ban or penalise the website. Despite the risk of ban, marketers still can go for black hat marketing because it helps in boosting up the page location in search result. Example of black hat marketing are:
*Keyword stuffing - keywords can be provided, among others, in meta tags, alt tags, comment tags, as invisible text to human eyes. By overusing the same keywords throughout a web page, search engines algorithm, that reads keywords, will drive the web page up in its search result.
*Doorway and cloaked pages - web site contain web pages that are listed in search result. However, when entering these pages, users are redirected to other pages. Hence, the search result contents do not match the page displayed to users.
*Link farming - submitting your URL to a website which includes a link directory with a large number of links to other sites with totally disrelated content.
*Hidden text - hiding text in the page or website is also a black hat SEO technique. It is considered as spam and search engine can ban the website.
Gray hat marketing
Gray hat marketing lies between white hat marketing and black hat marketing. Here, the site owner provides greater risks than white hat marketing, by disobeying to some of the search engine guidelines, but at the same time ensures limited disobedience so as not to fall into black hat marketing. For example, gray hat marketing may involve a keyword density higher than required but not too excessive.
Websites involved in gray hat marketing may face penalties, however they may be safe from ban.

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