Search Engine Optimization is primarily focused on increasing a certain websites ranking and visibility on the major engines. This is needed to effectively increase and generate more traffic to the website. Typically, Search Engine Optimization follows certain guidelines to ensure that it is using the right practices to ensure success in increasing website ranking.

For major search engines like Google, it naturally would want to present its searchers are the relevant searches based on the user's search criteria, or the use of keywords and phrases. Unfortunately, there are some individuals who tries to beat the system so to speak, and use underhanded methods for search engine optimization, this is known as the Black Hat SEO. To gain better understanding of Black Hat SEO and what it entails, here are the most common tricks of the trade:

Use of Hidden Texts. These are texts that are not seen by the visitor o user, but can be crawled by search engine spiders. One of the most common way of doing this is hiding the texts by making the font color similar with the background. Search engines are now able to spot this, and one can be penalized for using such underhanded method.

Cloaking. Another black hat search engine optimization technique, this involves delivering a unique set of content for search engine, which is entirely different from what visitors would read.

Keyword Stuffing. As the name suggests, this type of search engine optimization practice involves jamming the content with keywords, thereby faking the search engines as to the relevance of the content.

Link Farms. This activity involves putting a number of links into a website which are in truth irrelevant. Since link farms are basically linked together, this will in now way boost the popularity of a website.

As you can see, there are some Search Engine Optimization techniques that needs to be avoided, if you don't want to be penalized for using black hat SEO.