Hello, this is Chris Anderson with your L-G-B Marketing Tip being broadcast from the gorgeous Big Island of Hawaii.

This morning we're covering a black hat versus white hat seo techniques and how to stay out of trouble with Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Since a lot of you will be using SEO companies, I want to give you some help with questions to ask and how to make sure your SEO company is white hat.

Anyway, two different schools: we say, white hat versus black hat. In a nut shell, white hat techniques are practices considered "value added" in the eyes of Google, MSN, and Yahoo, basically ethical things or practices you do to your site that adds value to the visitor (and helps you score points in the serps.)

On the other side, the "black hat" is just like it sounds, deceptive and unethical practices that can really get you in deep doo doo. We've heard of web pages getting booted out of Google for doing fraudulent or misleading "black hat" practices.

So a couple examples of white hat techniques, anything that adds value for your traffic. Anytime you give good content (text, videos) anything deemed "good information" that's going to help you out with the search engines and you should be treated favorably by the search engines with the goal being that you receive a ton of back links for great sites.

Black hat techniques are practices like keyword stuffing where you might go in and replicate your keyword over and over and over on a webpage maybe in white text against a white background so to the normal eye it's not obvious but to Yahoo, MSN and the other serps it's a very deceptive practice and one of the worst things you can do. Another black-hat example is "spammy techniques" like when you submit your sites to thousands of search engine directories in a very spammy (robotic) and non-value-added way. That's generally looked down on as well (for instance, submitting your site to directories with automatic submission software that duplicates content, or contracting with third-world companies that use cheap labor to do virtually the same thing.)

So when you're meeting with your search engine optimization company, make sure you really understand what their strategy is and (make sure) that you relay to them that you're only interested in ethical ways to promote your web site that adds value to your visitor.

More on this later, but for today, this is your LGB Marketing Report from www.letsgobanners.com

Aloha from the SEO Guy (69 Beach!)