White hat SEO
White hat SEO is following proper SEO strategies according to Google guidance to rank better in search engines. Implementing these strategies may take time to give results, but the effects will be long-term and lead to higher conversion rates. The supreme thing in the white hat SEO is writing good quality content without any duplicates for the readers.
Black hat SEO
Black hat SEO is following improper SEO strategies. Using SEO methods to crack or cheat Google algorithms. The results from the Black hat SEO may be quick but the effects will not be long-term. If the Google algorithm finds out about Black hat SEO practices in any website it will penalize that website from getting traffic sometimes it may permanently remove that website from Google.
White hat SEO strategies
Quality content
Optimized for mobile
Use keywords in Meta descriptions
Keyword research
On page optimization
External linking
Quality content
Good quality content is giving exact answers to the user's search by providing valuable information. Don’t produce content for search engines produce content to solve human questions and queries. SEO experts suggest that content having more than 1800 words ranks better on google
Optimized for mobile
More than 50% of worldwide people use mobile phones to access the internet. It might vary depending upon the target niche. In B2C websites most of the traffic will come from mobile devices. In B2B websites most of the traffic will come from desktops.
There is a google algorithm called mobilegeddon which promotes websites that are optimized properly for mobile and tab devices.
Use keywords in Meta description
Meta description has to be 150 - 160 characters which are 800 - 920 pixels to rank better on google. Adding twice the target keyword in the meta description will help websites rank better. Don’t add a target keyword more than twice then Google will consider that as keyword stuffing which might lead to penalizing of websites.
Keyword research
Keyword research is the supreme thing in white hat SEO. Find keyword monthly search volume using Google keyword planner, SEMrush, and Ahrefs. Add these keywords 4-5 times on a page or blog.
On page optimization
Use optimized H1, H2, and H3 tags with quality keywords, create URLs with optimized keywords, use alt text for images, and add internal links.
External linking
According to google guidance, we can add up to 10 external links to our blogs or pages. Adding external links which have higher domain authority will increase your trust flow. Adding redirect links to the website from which you are getting traffic will create a loop which is good for SEO.
Black hat SEO strategies
Keyword stuffing
Duplicate content
Hidden text
Doorway pages
Cloaking
Paid links
Fake reviews
Poor redirects
Google bombing
Comment spam
Keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing is the most commonly used Black hat SEO strategy. Earlier keyword stuffing is not a Black hat SEO people add their main target keyword as many times in a blog or page to rank better. On April 24, 2012, Google released an update called Google penguin the purpose of this algorithm is to penalize websites that use bad link-building techniques and keyword stuffing. Now adding main target keywords more than 5 times on a blog or a page is having a higher chance of getting penalized. In most cases adding the main keyword, 5 - 10 times is fine exceeding more than that will leads to penalization of websites.
Duplicate content
Duplicate content is having the same content in the same language across different websites. In most cases, Google will never rank the websites that are using duplicate content. Make sure to write unique content. Check plagiarism before publishing every content on the website. Some commonly used plagiarism checkers are Quilbot, smallseotools, Grammarly
Hidden text
Hidden text is used to rank better on search engines it is only visible to search engines and not visible to readers. It can be done by making the font color to the exact background color or changing the font size to zero. Using this Black hat SEO technique may lead to a permanent ban of websites.
Doorway pages
Doorway pages are created to get more traffic to the websites. These pages act as a funnel to generate traffic to the main pages. These pages are created only to gain traffic with a higher amount of keyword stuffing they don't provide any valuable information and most of these pages have duplicated content thus it is against google guidelines.
Cloaking
Cloaking is one of the worst Black Hat SEO techniques it is done by providing different URLs to google search engines and different URLs to readers. It is considered a violation of Google guidelines unfortunately some of the websites using cloaking are still ranking first in SERP.
Paid links
Backlinks are essential to gain domain authority thus most website owners buy backlinks from high domain authority websites which is fine but if the links are mentioned as sponsored Google will consider that as a violation of webmaster guidelines.
Fake reviews
This is the most common technique which is used to cheat search engines by giving fake reviews for their business websites. This is mostly done by making people give fake five reviews on their websites by giving them money or a discount on their business.
Poor redirects
301 redirects to new pages or hyperlinks in the blogs are pages to redirect traffic from one page to another will consider ethical but the redirected page needs to have the same or related information as the old page. If the new page has entirely different content then it will consider Black Hat SEO.
Google bombing
Google bombing is the practice of unnaturally raising a website's SEO ranking in Google's search results. The page in question is linked to by inbound links that refer to a keyword that does not appear on the page in question and is, thus, unrelated to the search term input. A higher rating in the Google search results can be attained if a particularly big number of links are inserted in this manner. Google bombs are occasionally the result of crowdsourcing, in which many webmasters associate particular terms with a particular page.
Comment spam
It is the process of adding irrelevant comments to the blogs and adding website links in other blog comments.
Conclusion
White hat SEO is always suggested but it takes some time to show results that's why some people are doing Black hat SEO to rank faster.
Slow results are always better than penalization or a permanent ban of websites.