Why is White Hat SEO important to me?

The business of search engine optimization is infested with spam and the type that push it are considered Black Hat. They are the evil do-ers of the Internet and, just like bad guys in old western movies, they wear Black Hats. You could tell the good guys in the cowboy movies because they wore White Hats.

Wikipedia: A white hat hacker, also rendered as ethical hacker, is, in the realm of information technology, a person who is ethically opposed to the abuse of computer systems.

You can essentially replace the word hacker with search optimizer and words computer systems with search engines. Here is Google on White Hat SEO. Here is Wikipedia on White Hat SEO

The practice of White Hat Search Engine Optimization, also known as Ethical SEO, aims to make it easier for the search engines to tell when your site's content is relevant to a keyword search. In most cases, we do this by making a site genuinely more useful to its human visitors, so that they will recommend it to others by linking it from their own websites. The most important White Hat technique is simply to have a website worth recommending. This is not an easy task, and certainly can require a great deal of work, but it is the honest way, and the only way, to create long lasting page rank.