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What is White Hat SEO

 Rooted in ancient religious beliefs, the color white is said to represent 'light' and 'goodness' while the color black is said to represent 'darkness' and 'evil'.

Hollywood took this belief that the colors white and black represented the virtues of goodness and evil a step further by dramatizing them in early westerns. The heroes in these films wore white cowboy hats, while the villains wore black cowboy hats. This made it easy for viewers to quickly separate the good guys from the bad.

The colors of white and black are still used today to separate those things believed to be virtuous from those things believed to lack virtue.

The internet marketing and promotions industry has capitalized on the worldwide knowledge and continued usage of this concept of separating good from bad with color designations in much of the terminology used in that industry today. "White Hat SEO" is one such term, and not without controversy, used frequently in the marketing and promotions industry today.

What does a search engine do? When you enter a keyword, or keywords into the search box on your internet browser, a search engine, (using complicated scripts)  picks up your inquiry and searches for web pages that best match the keyword(s) you have entered. A search engine provides you with the results you see before you on your computer screen by reading the content and web addresses of various web pages, and grabbing those that best match your search criteria.

What is SEO? SEO refers to search-engine-optimization. This means that the content on a web page has been optimized by the strategic placement of the words that internet-surfers most often use when searching for specific information. Optimizing is a technique used by webmasters to enhance a web page's chances of being picked-up and displayed in the results window by a search engine.

What does -White Hat SEO mean? This is said to represent a higher code of business ethics adhered to by internet entrepreneurs, as opposed to a lower code of business ethics conducted by those who would fall into the category of "Black Hat SEO." This is where the controversy over the terms White and Black Hat SEO comes in.

Enhancing a web page’s chances of being picked up by a search engine through optimization is at its basic level "tricking" a search engine into choosing a particular web page over the millions of similar web pages in existence. Therefore neither White Hat, nor Black Hat wearers can claim innocence, as they are each involved in the strategic-tricking of search engines.

For many, the distinction between the two, boils down to the manner in which optimization is accomplished. Those on the White Hat side "optimize" their web pages with content containing the keywords most used in internet searches, but these keywords are spread naturally throughout a piece of content that is actually informative, or entertaining. Those on the Black-Hat side tend to employ what is known as "keyword-stuffing" which means the web page content is filled with keywords most often used in searches with no consideration to whether the content flows naturally or is actually informative or entertaining. It is also widely know that the scammers of the internet world, who are not known to operate under high standards of ethics to begin with, prefer Black Hat SEO techniques to White Hat SEO techniques

There are of course many other SEO techniques used by both sides that can be mostly accomplished in at least two ways. Whether any of the techniques used in SEO should be separated into "good" and "bad" categories, at this point, still remains a personal interpretation.