What is white hat SEO and black hat SEO?

SEO techniques can be defined in two broad categories, white hat and black hat.

White hat techniques follow the search engines guidelines and make content easy for search engines to index. Black hat techniques are not approved by search engines and involve deceptive techniques to trick search engine algorithms.

An example of a white hat technique is as creating content for users not for search engines. A black hat technique can be creating hidden text or text with the same colour as the page background.

Search engines penalise websites for using black hat techniques by reducing their rankings or removing the website from their search results.