There is still much debate over White Hat and Black Hat SEO tactics.  First, lets understand what SEO is: it is Search Engine Optimization.  SEO covers a wide range of tactics and procedures, and ranges from on-site optimization to off-site marketing.  Google still holds you cannot pay for search engine rankings, but is that really the case?

I started writing this article when I noticed a lot of blogs picking up my articles.  These blogs had urls that had no meaning or relevancy to my industry.  It seemed like someone was creating a free blog and cramming it with content and adsense, hoping for Page Rank increase and Ad Revenue.  These blogs are poorly put together, and some even were obviously full of automatically generated content, which was nothing more than a bunch of words randomly positioned throughout the site.

I started investigating a little and it turns out, many of these blogs point to sites and have the same anchor text.  The blogs are simply a means to get incoming links with the anchor text of your choice to boost search engine placement for keywords.  Granted, I benefit from some of the additional links coming to my site from these "blogs", but I can't help but think of these pages as useless content black holes that are used to prey on adsense revenue and to essentially "cheat" in obtaining search engine rankings for keywords.  I would consider this Black Hat SEO tactics.

This is just one of the tactics I found recently to be less than reputable.  According to Google Webmaster Guidelines, incoming links act as a vote for your site.  There "votes" affect your page ranks and your keyword ranking in search results based on the incoming Page Rank of the site that links to you, and the anchor text used as the link.  voting for yourself hundreds or thousands of times by creating garbage web sites or blogs doesn't qualify as an ethical SEO tactic. 

So what does qualify as an ethical SEO tactic?  There are a lot of answers to that one.  You can first start by creating a website that has good content.  It should offer products, services, information, opinions, or be some other media type that people will find useful.  Then, you can follow guidelines set up by the search engines to optimize that content for you industry keywords.  Once you have a quality site, its time to tell people about it.  Submit it to directories and get it added to listings.  If you have an e-commerce site, get listed in local or regional directories.  Write articles about your products or services and submit them to article directories.  Create Press Releases about your new site and what it offers.  Start a real blog with frequently updated content that people can follow and comment on.  Use your expertise and experience to bring a fresh perspective to the industry.  Once you have something useful for your customers or your audience, then you will naturally begin to generate votes and links for your site.  That is how to optimize for search engines.