WhiteHat SEO vs. BlackHat SEO - What's the difference?

In a nutshell, whitehat search engine optimization (SEO) = good website design!

But that doesn't really define, or explain, what the two terms mean. Whitehat SEO is where website designers and optimizers "play nice" and try to follow all of the search engine guidelines to optimize a website. Blackhat SEO is where website designers and optimizers use backdoors, cloaking, and other tricks to optimize sites.

Whitehat SEO and blackhat SEO are two very different, and normally opposing, views of how to perform search engine optimization for themselves and clients. Google is very clear on their view of SEO:

Google does not consider SEO to be spam. To Google, SEO only becomes spam when it goes against our quality guidelines and moves into things like hidden text, hidden links, cloaking, or sneaky redirects...Truthfully, much of the best SEO is common-sense: making sure that a site’s architecture is crawlable, coming up with useful content or services that has the words that people search for, and looking for smart marketing angles so that people find out about your site (without trying to take shortcuts). ~ Matt Cutts, Google

Whitehat SEO is not complex, and through proper training any site owner can be successful at performing effective and safe search engine optimization to achieve the rankings they would like for keyword phrases that will definitely bring them qualified traffic. The bigger problem is most web designers are not familiar with all of the latest guidelines, and could potentially get a site penalized for doing what was perfectly ok just a few months ago. Keeping your skills up to date through Search Engine training and SEO mentoring / SEO coaching programs will go a long way to maintaining your success!

If hiring a search engine optimizer is outside your current budget then look at training for yourself or your website designer, I am offering a free workshop on understanding the search engines. And starting this spring I will be offering full search engine optimization classe as a 3-day intensive, hands-on search engine marketing workshop.

Emily Leach has opened a Search Engine Academy and teaches a 3-day intensive, hands-on search engine marketing workshop in New Mexico and Arizona