When you are planning to start an SEO campaign, it is essential to know the techniques used to optimize your website. This is because there are some SEO firms, which practice various illegal and unethical SEO techniques in their campaigns. Optimizing a website with illegal and unethical SEO techniques in their campaign is called as Black hat SEO. Search engines ban websites that use black hat SEO techniques. Therefore, you have to be cautious while hiring an SEO company and verify that they are using ethical and legal techniques.

The following are some of the unethical techniques that are frequently used by black hat SEO firms.

?Hidden Page Text: As the content is the key for ranking the websites, black hats add abundant invisible text with the help of CSS (Cascading Style Sheet), or JavaScript by using white text on a white background to hide the text. Usually the text is hidden because it doesn't match with content of the page, but it can get the search engine ranking.

?Keyword Stuffing: In this technique, the black hats will excessively load the content and meta tag with the target keywords. Generally keyword stuffing consists of litter keywords to deceive the search engines. When search engine discovers the keyword stuffing in your site, it may ban your site from the search results.

?Cloaking Pages: This technique can be considered as similar and also advanced to the above two methods. Here the page content that is accurately visible only to the search engine spider will be displayed differently to the browsers. This technique makes use of either IP address or the HTTP referrer request. Though it may increase traffic from search engines, it looses the ethical traffic that is generated through directories.

?Perverted Link Building: This technique is used to build plenty of back links. When there are thousands of back links linked to a brand new website, then probably it may be due to the black hat technique. Typically this technique uses comment spamming, forum spamming and link exchange programs. Black hats create many micro sites that linked among them, which are intended only to build many links that are highly keyword stuffed.

?Doorway and Gateway Pages: In this technique the Black hat experts create a result page, which is completely different from the actual page. They fill the content with certain keywords that can draw traffic to the website. These result pages are not linked to the site, but will allegedly get the ranking to the site.

With this information you'll be able to recognize few unethical Black hat techniques that you should avoid while optimizing your website.