Gone are the days when marketing was all about promoting your products, services as well as anything that you were interested in selling or creating awareness about. Today’s world has been bifurcated into two different entities. One is the real world wherein we see, meet and interact with people while seeing then in flesh and blood. And the other entity is virtual or physically non-existent. Both of these worlds have a different importance as well as meaning in our everyday life. It does not matter whether you are a businessman, or a school teacher. The virtual world has carved for itself a niche that is unbelievingly strong and aggressive in its expansion. This virtual world is the world of internet.

If you are a businessman who wants to promote his products, or a service based organization that wants to promote the services you offer or an individual who really needs to express his thoughts as well as opinions on the world or anything that holds some importance and meaning then the medium of internet is one medium that would provide you with a larger audience and a better platform. But the effort or the knowledge just does not stop here. This virtual world has a language of its own. It has a tradition and a culture of its own. It has a religion of its own and all these are to be respected or even revered. The most rudimentary tool that can help you in understanding and going on a voyage or simply touring this world is the powerful raft called the search engine. And to get noticed in this virtual world or to create a space for yourself in this world you need assistance and that is where the techniques of SEO steps in. SEO or when expanded the Search Engine Optimization comprises of different techniques and efforts to make sure that you or your website remains at the vantage position in all the search engine rankings.

Some of the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, or MSN all have specific algorithms that test the quality and competency of the websites or any written material. In accordance with that they rank the websites for the specific keywords. Any SEO company would endeavor to make sure that right from the designing, development and subsequent promotion of the website, the website is ranked high on the search engine.

Basically the techniques that the SEO companies adopt in order to promote the client websites can be divided into three categories-

• The Black Hat techniques
• The White Hat techniques
• The Grey Hat techniques

# The Black Hat Techniques: These techniques are used by the SEO companies in order to get the results quickly by using unethical means and methods. They might appear to be producing results but those are all short lived. In the longer run they would prove harmful for the company as well as the client. In many cases it might even lead to the banning of the site from the search engines.

# The White Hat Techniques:  Those techniques that are in compliance with the guidelines of the search engines are the ones that are called white hat techniques. It might not be as swift in producing results but once they do they can assure a better output.

# The Grey Hat Techniques: These techniques are those that do not fall into any of the above categories. On many occasions they might not be compliant with the search engine guidelines but nevertheless they are not as bad and harmful as the black hat techniques.