White hat seo = write really good content, then let as many people know about it as possible in the hope it gets shared, linked etc.
Black hat seo = use software to automatically make it look like the above is happening.
In reality you are just aiming to get as near as possible to white hat - in other words the highest quality links from the most legit looking sites in the hope that your efforts are going to give you long term ranking.
You can't get the answers on how to do this in one thread though, but rest assured Bhw is the best place on the net to learn about seo so just study this place - read the guides, case studies etc and you will learn.
The fundamentals to start you off - you need to know what you want to rank for, you need to look at the competition in terms of who they are, what they are doing and how much they are spending in order to determine if you can beat them.
You need to optimise your site for those keywords in terms of on page seo as well as making sure you are providing something of value to the market for that particular keyword.
Then you need backlinks - the more quality backlinks with high metrics that you can get, the better.
