When it comes to search engine optimization, the menu of techniques open to you are firmly divided into “white hat” and “black hat” territory, depending on how ethical the search engines consider them to be. That’s the common wisdom, but you’re moments away from discovering that the line between white and black is not so clear-cut. Here are some SEO strategies that can be rescued from the black hat column if you employ them correctly.

Normally, paying money in exchange for backlinks is deep in black hat territory. There is a notable exception to this policy, though: charitable donations. Search engines seek out and punish pay-for-link schemes based on the identity of the seller; legitimate charities are never marked down for punitive action. Select a charity that you know is reputable and see if there is a way to get them to link to your site. The link will have SEO benefits, and your donation will help support a worthy cause, too.

For a while, redirect pages were highly suspicious optimization tools. Automatically sending a visitor to a page he or she did not search for is not normally ethical behavior. These days there are some entirely legitimate uses for automatic redirects, and you should feel free to make use of them. Checking visitors’ IP addresses and sending them to customized local content is okay, as are redirects that link commonly-misspelled search terms to the proper keyword. Using these redirection tactics will allow you to do some good optimization work on very specific keywords.

Article marketing has always been a good way to build backlinks, but one problem you might face is article directory sites do not weigh nearly as heavily in search algorithms as other, less-automated sites. In order to get your articles posted more widely around the web, it’s an excellent idea to issue them under a Creative Commons license. Let anyone who wants to re-post your articles for free; the added publicity is payment enough for the value of your content.

On the other hand, if you have the expertise and writing skills to generate really top-notch articles, you could start selling exclusive rights to them to other website owners. This provides similar benefits to the Creative Commons strategy outlined above. It obviously produces additional revenue; the drawback is that the quality of your articles does have to be exceptional in order to interest buyers.

Finally, one of the most ambitious publicity strategies you can use to improve your site’s search engine ranking is to intentionally draw journalistic attention to your site. This involves a lot of social interaction, because you’ll need to convince reporters that you’re doing something news-worthy. It’s also risky, because you cannot control the keyword content of reporters’ articles. The exceptional search ranking value of links from reputable news outlets can make this idea worth the effort, though.

Optimizing your website for search engine performance is a very demanding process. You need to stay on top of your game and give your SEO program constant attention if you want to maintain its effectiveness. If you want to stay ahead of your competitors, you have do to everything you can without drawing negative attention from the search engines. Try out the techniques in this article in order to get a leg up on the competition.