Hackers and Search Engine Optimization types are often referred to as either Black or White hats. 

Black Hats

Think Pirate.  Use any trick in the book to make your site stand out.  Thousands of fake or paid link backs, repeated use of the same keywords on the page.  Text that is hidden or unseen (like image alt text tags).  Use botnets to increase your traffic statistics.

Tactics like these are all little things designed to “polish a turd”.  Got a crappy site?  No problem, just trick everyone at least once into dropping by, we can make some quick bucks off the suckers… 

But we find that people who spend all their time “optimizing” and no time creating new content are always the ones crying foul when their trickery gets noticed and they get dropped from the search engines.  But once again, they don’t care, the are black hats and move on to the next project…If this is you and you are comfortable with it, it's OK, just remember to keep moving...

White Hats

These are the “ethical” folks who believe that they have unique content and design with the end user in mind and don’t waste their time (or consciously avoid) unscrupulous practices when designing new websites. 

Maybe not even meta tags, easy to spider content, content designed to be viral or bookmarked. 

Perhaps they pay for advertising themselves and don't appreciate bogus clicks showing up on their account either.

There is a reason the White Hats operate this way; it's not that they are altruistic.  If you take the long-term view and spend a lot of time and effort building a new website the last thing the want is the dreaded “you have been banned from AdSense” email for violating the terms of service.

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