SEO is a huge topic for nearly every webmaster out there. Because SEO is a tool, using it in the proper way or abusing it totally depends upon its user. Most of the inexperienced people out there abuse SEO to the maximum extent and harm everyone else in the process.

To start off, there has never been more spam on the web than there is now. Spam has grown to such an extent that if website content is not kept under check, the website will lose its value dramatically.

The issue of spam raises the question of "white hat SEO" and "black hat SEO" techniques. In my opinion, the difference between them is small: Any type of link building which looks overtly artificial and is frowned upon is black hat.

Let us delve a little deeper into the subject. White hat SEO are "acceptable" practices undertaken by websites in efforts for increasing their business and visibility. They are acceptable by the search engines and the online community because although the link building involved is far from natural, it is not done in a way which abuses the system. An example of white hat SEO would be submissions to a handful of good quality directories.

Black hat SEO, on the other hand, is when users delibrately abuse other websites and intellectual properties in hope to get an unfair advantage over the system. For example, posting good quality comments on blogs is white hat SEO but simply using a script to send out a flurry of comments which add no value to unrelated blogs is black hat.

Black hat techniques are very simple to spot: They look overtly unnatural. Scripts which are used to spam websites and blogs are designed in a way which makes spotting spam a very simply thing to do. These scripts are designed to post nothing but unrelated gibberish and a list of links as a blog comment.

The benefits of white hat SEO are many. Firstly, you can increase your link popularity and authority over time by undertaking ethical SEO. Secondly, there is no chance that you get penalized by the search engines. The downside is that white hat SEO might take a considerable amount of time to show results.

Black hat SEO is designed for short term gains and potentially huge long term losses. Google now follows policies which make it very easy to recognize spam and black hat SEO. Users undertaking black hat tactics will see their websites penalized or even banned in the long-run.