You may have heard the terms Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO. Wearing a black SEO hat means you try to game the search engines to appear high in the rankings. While this sometimes works in the short-term, Google is quite smart, and they ALWAYS catch up to the black hats. And when they do, they not only will downgrade you, but they’ll punish you for trying to cheat and banish you to a very dark place from which it will take a long time to escape.

Wearing a white SEO hat means you use legitimate techniques to rank higher in search engine results. While tweaks to Google’s algorithms may slightly affect your rankings from time to time, using legitimate methods to climb to the top means the bottom isn’t going to fall out from under you as search engines evolve.

The bottom line is that white hat SEO is about creating content on your site that adds value for your visitors. The Legal Techie wears a white hat.