What I am having a harder time with is separating what is black / grey / white hat some times from learning so much on this amazing forum. Obviously I want my service to be squeeky clean white hat.
For keyword research I'm not sure it's possible to be blackhat.
For link building, basic whitehat link building is something like this..
Finding good quality directories and manually submitting sites to them. Type viagra into the search box and you will see whether they have been spammed to death or are still ok. If you're using directories for clients I would advise going with paid directories. There are two reasons for this
1) Paid directories generally have better editorial guidelines and so will provide better quality links for your clients.
2) Free directories can take months to add your links and your clients will want a report at the end of the month.
Once you have multiple clients you will be able to negotiate large discounts with directory owners.
For articles, if you write them yourself then it's whitehat. Don't bother submitting to 500 sites..submit to ten or twenty.. ideally though you would want unique content on each article but maybe that's not something you can organise yet.
As for social bookmarking, if you build natural profiles (e.g. include sites that aren't just those of your clients) and do all of this manually then this is whitehat.
As for the onsite optimisation - if you are simply changing headers, titles and writing a bit of text then this is whitehat.
Seomoz have a nice list of whitehat ranking factors with opinions from some top seo people. http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
Do all of this and you'll stay white. I would avoid anything grey for the timebeing until you get used to doing everything by the book then you will start to recognise the differences between black and white.
