There is no such thing as white hat SEO in my opinion, and black hat SEO is dangerous and risky if not done with caution. I was doing link exchanges a couple years ago at a SEO company I worked at, which was considered white hat SEO by the boss, however big G does not encourage link exchanges. The only white hat SEO technique I see is quality content that attracts natural links, but that's hard to achieve especially with a non-authority website. That being said grey hat is the way to go.