any type of seo trying to artificially put some site higher in serps. so be honest - there is no honest and not-honest seo techniques. maybe not-honest and not so not-honest...
All sites rank "artificially", since search engines are incapable of measuring quality or relevance to a searcher's intent and instead rely on proxy signals like links and similarity to keywords on a page or in a link graph. Good SEO concentrates both on making sure that your content creation does not interact poorly with the 100%-guaranteed-to-be-artificial way that search engines perceive your website, and on strategic issues in shaping how you create and communicate value in such a way that it will actually be found by people. For example, if you routinely create long essays with metaphorical titles, you need to be told by your SEO guy that search engines don't do metaphors well and searchers don't typically look for them, so they need to be retitled to be more fact- or benefit-oriented. (This is a lesson that the traditional media learned, and it required absolute bloodletting in the newsrooms to get it across: "Studio Flutters As Swan Soars" used to be newspaper best practice, for web writing it is now "Strong Black Swan Opening Weekend Did Not Help Studio Stock Price.")
More broadly, this attitude is like the reflexive engineer distrust of marketing, believing that product quality excuses all sins. It doesn't. If your product sounds scary to a user, and she avoids trying it because of that, you fail to create value for her. You need to communicate that your product is not scary. If that requires a photo of a woman with a headset then it is your duty to your customer to put that same woman with a headset stock photo that everyone uses so that she feels comfortable enough to experience the life-changing benefits your product has to offer.
Not true, whitehat SEO is more about being seen and understood by a webcrawler. Honest SEO techniques include structuring your site in an appropriate way to allow optimal crawling, including appropriate content/meta data, making sure your http redirects are setup correctly. Stuff like that.
2both commenters above - deliver quality content - this is "honest seo". when you start "proper" link building, moving content above header and push it down with css, highlight keywords with [strong] or [em] tags, etc - this is all artificial.
my point is - google became marketer's place, not search engine anymore.. whenever you search for something, you will get stuck into "seo'ed" "brands" with generic names.
