What is Black Hat SEO?

To start, Wikipedia defines Black Hat SEO as "attempt[ing] to redirect search results to particular target pages in a fashion that is against the search engines' terms of service".

The whole point of a search engine is to allow people to find the websites and pages of information they're interested in amongst the huge and constantly growing world wide web. 

To that end, search engines, certainly the big three, have terms of service and more importantly algorithms to ensure only relevant results are returned for any given search. Black Hat SEO practitioners try to game the system and effectively "con" the search engine into including their site when users search for a particular term or phrase when ordinarily it would not be deemed relevant by the search engine.

Is Black Hat SEO right for your business?

Some Black Hat SEO providers defend the practice as being perfectly legitimate, but questions of morality aside, what is probably on your mind is whether this is something your business ought to take advantage of. These days a website's traffic, largely irrespective of how it was generated, translates into some commercial benefit from increased sales or enquiries to advertising revenue. So, there is nothing wrong with employing whatever lawful techniques to boost your website's traffic.

Now, let's look at this from the search engine's point of view. Their entire reason for existence (and the fabulous wealth they've built as companies) is to sort through the web and return relevant search results to the user. Beyond that, their revenue in its tens of billions of dollars, depends on there being exactly only one avenue for you to guarantee your website is displayed prominently against a key word or phrase of your choice, namely paid search results (also called pay per click advertising or PPC).

What's the catch? 

Simple! It is not in the search engine's best interest for any other way to exist whereby businesses can gaurantee placement of their website without paying them. As a result they spend a lot of effort and money to tweak the algorithms which determines what's relevant and what's not to ensure Black Hat tricks don't work, or at least not for long.

 This means that if you employ Black Hat SEO tricks you need to keep changing them, to try and outsmart the hundreds and thousands of engineers the big search engines employ to thwart your efforts. This might seem exhausting to you, the business owner, but to your Black Hat SEO provider it sounds like GOLD, a never ending river of GOLD!

So what's my best bet?

Using Black Hat SEO tricks to optimise your site for the robots search engines use to read and analyse your site tend to be very hard to use by human beings, on top of being like running on a treadmill. On the other hand, having a sensible optimisation strategy centered around relevant, frequently updated content and attaching meaningful labels to pages, images, links and so on, will not only boost your website's search engine rankings but will also make it genuinely useful for the human beings who after finding your website will check it out and try to interact with your business.

What do I need?

You can certainly seek help from an SEO professional from the many around who are focused on making your website better, and of course you need your website to be able to handle all the changes required. If your current website can't do the job, find a new one that does!