‘White Hat’ Search engine optimisation refers to optimising the content of a web site to be both useful to the web browsing public and to maximise its visibility to the search engines. By doing this you increase your chances of climbing up the search engine rankings in the long term. It is in contrast to ‘Black Hat’ techniques which seek to fool the search engines into giving a web site a high ranking, these can work out to be both expensive as they have to be continually developed and risky as there is always the chance of being ‘sandboxed’ by the search engines. That is a search engine realising you are trying to cheat their system and penalising your web site by removing its ranking altogether.
Putting development time into ‘White Hat’ techniques is in the long term the most effective solution to Search Engine Optimisation. In doing so you build a high quality web site and content, both of which will give you the most stable platform for web site traffic as search engine referencing techniques and their page ranking algorithms change with time.
