Ethical SEO, also known as White Hat SEO, refers to professionally accepted and legitimate search engine optimization techniques designed to ensure web pages are scannable and indexable by the search engine bots. Unlike Black Hat SEO, White Hat SEO does not involve tactics designed to mislead or trick either the end-user or the search engine.
Ethical SEO practices are designed to enhance the ranking or listing position of a website or individual web page within the search engine results pages. These practices maintain high quality end user experience by ensuring a keyword search by a user yields links to web pages that only contain content relevant to the search query.
Search engines like Google will punish websites they suspect of employing Black Hat SEO practices to gain high ranking by banning them from the search engine and in some cases filing a lawsuit.
Ethical SEO is based on the premise that high rankings, or listing positions within the search engine results pages, are achieved by supporting the objectives of the search engine property to maintain its integrity, to provide a high quality end-user experience, and to provide relevant, valuable content.