Ethical SEO?

If you have a business, the most important aspect is your product and the marketing of your product against your target audience. The most obvious way you can deliver your product or service to it's relevant mark is by building a web page. This is not enough. This is equivalent of creating a television campaign for barbie and buying broadcasting real estate between 3am and 4am. The reason for this is that with modern day search technology it is not as simple as Google, Yahoo or Bing simply referencing your page and adding it their search results.

Its important to remember that company's that get into the business of search engine technology are there for a reason. They may have woken up one day and thought, 'wow, wouldn't it be great if people could find stuff easier on the net?' but this quickly evolved into, 'hell, we can make a shed load of money by making our search more relevant and specific than the next guy'. And in this way, you can think of web designers and search engine designers as maintaining a constant dialogue.

But if you want to exploit something that doesn't want to be exploited what is the best way to go about it? Blindly continue with tried and tested techniques or follow your own laws of propagation? Of course you want the latter. You want to eschew link farms and keyword stuffing and any kind of black hat operation in favor of organic search ( the process of working within the laws of search engine algorithms).

What is called organic search results is really just a term for exploitation of presently accepted rules defining legitimacy. In the past you could build a link farm ( many meaningless pages that link with one another to increase search results ) or stuff the page you're optimising with keywords you're hoping to receive hits from. Both of which are considered unethical in the present environmental dialogue.

Naturally the terms 'ethical' and 'organic' are buzzwords and don't actually refer to anything more than an evolved form of exploitation.

Nowadays instead of approaching page design with target of merely increasing traffic, designers approach from the angle of increasing traffic through the search engines rules ie: having content on the page, that is for all intents and purposes stuffed with relevant keywords... once you consider the google process of removing 'stop words' (and, the, it, etc.). All the while maintaining the goal of boasting content relevant and natural to the sites design. This is where we enter the territory of organic search being widely accepted as natural but in actuality it is simply a more pragmatic way of bending the rules.

Is this all we need to consider when optimising a web page to be search engine compliant (SEO: search engine optimisation)? Definitely not. Google has only naturally been very tight lipped about the number and definition of parameters considered by it's algorithms but at present it's estimated at over 200. The only way designers can 'naturally' exploit these parameters is by an obvious process of examination of cause and effect – a skill SEO consultants can only acquire through experience. Making your investment more 'unnaturally – naturally' optimised. So what you want in a company offering search engine optimisation should most definitely be carefully considered. Aside from things like cost and initial results you need to examine the long term goals of your brand. Whether or not your choice will operate within or without of accepted SEO design and how that will reflect on you and your product and/or service.

In closing you need to decide on whether or not your choice of company has the experience, the knowledge of search engine algorithms and ethical SEO practice to deliver the service you need without the risk involved of turning consumers away from your brand.