Search Engine Optimization is a methodology of strategies, techniques and tactics often used by internet marketers or website owners to improve the visibility of a website on organic (“Natural” or “Unpaid”) search engine pages including Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines. It is common practice for internet users not to click on pages and pages of search results.
Thus in general, the higher ranked your website is, or the more frequently a website appears in the search results, the more visitors it will get from search engines. SEO also includes different types of searches such as video search, image search, academic search, local search and others.
Nowadays, many companies are using SEO strategy as a powerful tool for internet marketing. SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords users typically used to search, and which search engines are more preferred by the target users.
There are 2 types of SEO techniques to increase the rank of a website on search engines, namely White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO.
White Hat SEO
White Hat SEO refers to the use of SEO strategies, techniques and tactics that focus on human behavior and completely follows search engine rules and policies. For example, a website that is SEO optimized, yet focuses on relevancy and organic ranking is considered to be optimized using White Hat SEO practices.
Some other techniques include keyword analysis, backlinking, link building to improve link popularity and writing content for human readers. White hat SEO is more frequently used by those who intend to make a long-term investment on their websites. White Hat SEO is also called ethical SEO.
Black Hat SEO
Black Hat SEO refers to the use of aggressive SEO strategies, techniques and tactics that focus only on search engines and not a human audience. It does not obey the search engine rules. Examples of Black Hat SEO techniques include keyword stuffing, invisible text and doorway pages.
Black Hat SEO is more frequently used by people who are looking for quick financial return from their websites in short-term. Black Hat SEO can possibly result in your website being banned from a search engine.
However, since Black Hat SEO only focuses on short-term return business model, most of the experts expect to have their websites banned by search engines and other relevant risks after making a quick profit. Black Hat SEO is also called unethical SEO or just spamdexing.