Black hat and white hat SEO analogies should have given SEO beginners a hint of what these two SEO sides are about. If not, white hat SEO techniques are usually tactics that search engines tell SEO people to do if they desire to their websites to grade well or to at least show up anywhere in their search engine results pages. Black hat SEO techniques are practices that the search engines would not want search engine optimizers to be relevant.

Now if you are serious about learning how to promote a website with SEO, it pays to know the alleged good and bad SEO methods under white hat and black hat SEO, in that order. Since this SEO dichotomy is based on what the search engines think good or bad for their SERPs, it only makes sense that the webmaster guidelines set by major search engines (Google and Yahoo) were consulted.

Here are the Google and Yahoo webmaster guidelines or SEO do’s and dont’s list.

White Hat SEO according to Google and Yahoo:

Summarizing Google and Yahoo’s webmaster guidelines, unique and educational content, optimization of the title and alt tags or meta tags, avoiding the use of dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), use of texts as an alternative of images, and an overall good design intended for human searchers and not search engines were required.

Black Hat SEO according to Google and Yahoo:

Black hat SEO methods for Google and Yahoo include redirects or cloaking or the use of doorway or landing pages, participating in link farms or link exchange services that give IBLs from bad neighborhoods, use of automatic submission software, use of hidden text links (white link on white background, black text link on black background, etc.), excessive cross-linking to websites, extreme pop-ups that annoy readers, and duplicate content.