SEO is Search Engine Optimization by different techniques to improve the overall traffic on the website. By properly employing SEO the site comes at high position in SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) resulting in natural flow of related visitors on the landing page of the website. In modern day diversity of techniques are used for better internet marketing. Search engine like Google works through secret algorithm to determine the standing of website in terms of visitor preference. The content that has high visibility have higher traffic that leads to betterment of ranking. The good practices to improve ranking that are in accordance with rules set by search engine falls under white head SEO, while the shortcuts that is employed for quick return comes in black head SEO.

Difference in Practices

White hat SEO focuses on enhancing the experience of visitors on the website by employing content and links that keep the experience of human audience real. It is a long term investment so identifying keywords, doing proper research and rewriting meta-tags in a way that back link, content management and link building provide the informational support that the human readers look for when clicking on link.

The black hat SEO on the other hand focuses on crawlers and spiders, increasing the ranking of website in short span.  It gives visual and non visual indications to search engine spider and even human users in unethical way. The keywords are stuffed into the content in unnatural format, invisible text visible to search engine spiders that cannot be seen by naked eyes are put, the unrelated phrases are repeated to compromise on relevance and promote source index is done; and the fake pages are constructed for spiders to increase site index.

Results Effectiveness

Accessibility of user to a readable, relevant, well structured and properly written content is the ultimate result of white hat SEO. It uses cross linking of internal pages where there is need, and build inbound link from trusted relevant sources that takes time in building up.

The quick result generation by manipulating with content to deceive the search engine spider is the ultimate aim of black hat SEO. It generates fast results, something we look for in this speedy life, but the risk to get penalized is high. It can be the narrow escape for an ongoing organic traffic issue, but it is short sighted solution.

One can easily judge the difference between the two, by the fact that each time when Google comes up with Penguine update the life of black hat SEO comes to an end, while the reward of Panda Update from Google is reap by sites that have high quality content by using white hat SEO.

Difference between ethical (Whitehat) and unethical (Blackhat) SEO practices: An example is given below