There are so many ways to do SEO. And you've got the whole World Wide Web to explore...

There is the "White Hat" and the "Black Hat". The former includes the traditional ways of marketing a web site. On the other hand, the latter includes techniques that are distrusted by many. Others are thinking that black hat techniques will just be ignored by search engines. If not, they think of the morbid consequence of using it - the banning of the web site by the search engines. That spells death.

Nonetheless, no matter how beneficial or morose these techniques can be, the common denominator is that they are worth knowing. You don't want to grope in the dark figuring out the reason why they are like that, do you?

One of the black hat techniques is called cloaking. This technique has something to do with cheating. Cloaking is a technique that displays a highly optimized version of the page to the search engines at the same time displaying a totally different page to the visitors. The result is having an optimized site, which does not necessitate much maintenance. Cloaking involves creating 2 domains - the cloaking page which is the highly optimized page and the actual domain.

The drawback of applying cloaking is that your site can be banned if you are reported to the search engines. So, what the site owners do is keep the secret of cloaking. Cloaking is a bad practice. However, many site owners are doing it. To aid them in doing so, they purchase cloaking package online to create a cloaked web site. Said package costs $2480.

Aside from cloaking, other bad hat techniques include alt tag keyword stuffing, hidden text, title keyword stuffing and more. Nonetheless, these techniques can reflect negatively on your ranking.