First, you as a webmaster have a choice to make: you can either work on search engine promotion yourself or hire a professional to work for you.

Working yourself means constant learning: reading forums, joining a SEO community and investing quite a lot of time to acquire experience and get results.

Black hat and white hat
No, we are not going to talk about fashion here. Black hat is the name for SEO methods that are frowned upon by search engines. Search engines want to generate search results with relevant links. Black hat SEO specialists focus more on manipulating the results rather than on making your website more relevant.

One example could be using doorways. These are heavily optimized pages that do not have any useful content, but are often used to direct users to your home page. Another example is cloaking. It is when you show one type of content to search engines and a different type of content to regular users. There are lots of more sophisticated methods, but the idea behind them is to manipulate search engine rankings of your site without increasing its value to the visitors.

A good thing about black hat is that it can give you results much sooner than if you choose to use fair methods. The problem with black hat optimization is that you can be banned by search engines. They are getting smarter and can automatically detect attempts at manipulation. Even if you use something fancy, your competitors can report you to the search engine representatives and your site will be penalized.

White hat methods of optimization, on the other hand, focus more on creating better content for users and helping search engines attracting the users that look for that particular information. This may include writing good articles, persuading authoritative resources in your sphere to link to you and building relations offline, in the real world. There are surely more specialized methods, but the general idea of white hat is to help search engines and people find useful and relevant content.

Although good on paper, in reality it might be very complicated to use only white methods. It will take a lot of time and however hard you try, you may never get to top 10 with some very popular search queries.

White hat methods are often used to optimize your website for relevant, but less searched for terms. You can have one word “shoes” that might attract 10 000 searches a day, or you may have 100 different words that have only 200 searches each, but they are more specific, have less competition for top 10 and together might generate more traffic.