White hats and black hats sounds like the universal struggle between good and evil. Fortunately, in the world of search engine optimization, it is not quite that dramatic.

White hat SEO is the set of tactics that get you higher search engine page rankings which are considered to be legitimate ways to gain attention for your website.

Black hat SEO is the set of techniques that are considered to be unscrupulous ways to gain attention for your website. Although it may be tempting to wander over to the dark side in order to gain some additional traffic, it is often for short term gains only and most often for long term losses, thus really not worth it.

You can end up being blacklisted by Google, Yahoo and others. Once you have lost your credibility, it is very difficult to come back. You will probably have to start over again with a new website.

So what are these techniques? You can probably figure out some of them for yourself. Others are rather ingenious (or devious, depending on your point of view) and are generally out of the league of most of us run of the mill honest website owners.

Here are some more obvious black hat tactics:

- Use popular search terms along with your keyword specific terms to attract traffic. For example, if you sell golf clubs, you might create copy like Barack Obama Twitters about his YouTube video showing him using XYZ Company's golf clubs. This is blatant and your website will look desperate.

- Type in lots of keywords around your content using font color that is the same as the background color so the search engine sees tons of keyword
s but the viewer does not.

- Copy large amounts of content from websites that have a lot of traffic and hope they do not notice your plagiarism; it happens all the time.

- Repeat keywords so that they really do not make any sense. For example, We sell, beach towels and more beach towels and more beach towels, for people who want beach towels and for people who like beach towels. This is another desperate looking strategy.

- Cloaking: showing search engines one version of your page built for search engines and not for users, and showing your users another more user friendly page. This technique can easily get your site banned from all search engines. Build a site for users to increase retention and search engines will automatically rank your website higher due to your site's great usage statistics.

Here are a few less obvious tactics that will get you in trouble:

- Optimize a webpage by filling it up with popular keywords that disguise the true purpose of the site. This happens a lot with pornographic sites. You click on a site thinking that you are going to read about beaver ponds and you find a website with beaver pond type keywords all over the place surrounding porn photos. In the etailers case it would be like using popular keywords such as iPod and Apple and iTunes and so on to attract people to a site that sells knock off MP3 players.

- Register a domain name with a misspelled version of a popular website in order to confuse people. For example, register Twiter.com or Facebooks.com then try to sell your products to people who mistakenly go to your site.

Bottom line, it is easier and safer to figure out the right ways to attract traffic to your site. Play it safe and wear a white hat at all times.