Little help for a seo noob.

Sup Guys,

I'll keep this short, basically we've had a e-commerce site going for about 3-4 years now, domain is from 2007, we stupidly never focused very much on SEO, just kept our google adwords going, we were ranked #1 for a few keyword, but they had little to no competition.

We are now wanting to focus heavily on some SEo to get ourselves ranked high on certain decently competitive keywords

We are on the fence about the best way to get us ranked high ASAP, like 1-2 months, we have been talking to some of the cheaper india companies with good feedback, but we also know white hat takes a while

How big of a risk are we at if we use some black hat work? I know Google can sandbox older domains, but do we risk the same?

We are ranking decently already, just looking for some feedback

I would build a series of buffer sites to keep some distance between my site and any black hat work to mitigate the risk.

easy white hat way to build rank and also traffic is traffic geyser. you can create videos that promote your site so the content of the video will pre-sell your site.

If your that worried with the results, and if your going to be doing it yourself, use black hat methods to find the information you need, and white hat methods to capitalize on them. Or outsource it to someone who knows what they are doing ;-)