But the main thing you will need whichever route you choose is backlinks. These are the lifeblood of Search Engine Optimization, and something that cannot be got around.
Really its the means of getting these links that defines your methods as either "Black Hat or "White Hat".
Ethical -
This is where links grow organically via word of mouth, or the internet's version of it anyway. They are placed on sites that believe they are pointing to something of interest for their site visitors, and ethical SEO mimics this. You place as many backlinks pointing to your pages with your preferred keyword as anchor text.
Google visits these other sites, and follows the link to your site noting the keyword used. Each keyword counted is like casting a vote for your site, the more sites that point to your site using your keyword, the higher you will be placed in the SERPs for that search term.
It sounds simple, and it kind of is, but that is the very very basic overview of SEO, and doesn't really go deep into white hat SEO.
Not So Ethical
Black Hat on the other hand, does several things to scam the search engines. It either makes a site appear to have more links and pages than it actually has, or it gets links by scraping sites for blog comments, trackbacks, guest-books. In fact anywhere a link can be placed using anchor text, a black hat SEO guy will put it there - preferably using automation, and preferably 1000s of links at a time.
The benefits of White Hat, are simple: the links will stay in place for longer, as they were created with both the site owner, and the site link partner's permission.
The benefits of Black Hat are more money very very quickly, which to me is the sole point of black hat SEO, as once these links have been found by an unsuspecting site owner, they may be deleted.
If you can rank on page one for a term like "viagra" you will make money however short lived that may be (as every other Blackhatter is trying to do the same).
Both categories rely on one thing, and that is backlinks - its just how those links are aquired and how they are used that is the big difference.
