Google Online Business is what you are interested in if you are in the hunt for top position on the search engines. In search engine optimization terms, Google Online Business make your job 10 times easier than a website that has not already achieved this status. Some websites are already authority sites, but since they have not undergone search engine optimization they are not recognized by the search engines as such. Other websites either lack content our lack the links to be considered authority sites. On most search engines, for the highly competitive, high traffic keywords, you will notice that generally the top 10 results are loaded with authority sites. There are some exceptions of course, but in general the search engines smile favorably upon the websites they define as authority sites and reward these sites with top rankings.

An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.

Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms, or by a manual site review.