The word white hat originates from old western movies where
the nice guys wore the white hats and the crooks wore the black hats. Today the
term white hat SEO refers to ethical internet search engine optimization
techniques and black hat SEO refers to unethical approaches.
White hat SEO follows the guidelines set down by the search
engines themselves, such as naturally linking to other sites and not buying
links that your search engines don't like. If a link to another website has to
be bought it's not really a true vote for that website, because it has been
placed there just for financial gain and not because the hyperlink will be of
genuine interest to those sites visitors.
The utilization of keyphrases can be considered white or black
hat as white hat SEO'rs uses keyphases in the natural context of a body of
text, if you write your web copy for the visitors and not the search engines
you'll achieve better results.
Black hat techniques involve keyphrase stuffing which tries
to fool the internet search engine into thinking that a typical page is of more
relevance since it uses the keyphrase lots of times. The search engines have
algorithms for detecting this and can penalize a site for using these
techniques.
A white hat company will never try to cover up anything from
their clients; they'll keep them involved as much as they could in the SEO process and never mislead them in how they achieve their results.
It is definitely best to analyze an organization before
using them and read up about a few of the terminology used in this industry
because it will give you a better understanding on what's associated with
internet search engine optimization.
Another thing to be aware of is price, in case a company is
offering cheap services this will mean they are cutting corners and using black
hat SEO to attain results, as internet search engine optimization can be a long
process which can take months prior to the effort pays off. So keep clear of
companies that claim they could get quick results at knocked down prices.