When we visit web marketing and SEO forums, every so often, we will see debates about ethics in SEO industry. After being involved in these threads, it could become quite clear that there’s no unified methodology in the SEO industry. People may have different perspective on what they consider as legal and acceptable. It can be rather difficult to make statements about the SEO industry as a whole. In fact, SEO companies are keeping their campaign strategy and methodology secret. We could be in a situation where it can be quite confusing how we should achieve specific results. Experts are defining SEO as a process to improve traffic through higher ranking in search engine results. The real debate will be how people would achieve that.
However, we do know that success in SEO is determined by some common factors, such as methodology used, quality of the content, site structure and other factor. Our website won’t be able to succeed if we prioritize on random keyword. SEO isn’t voodoo and it is all about common sense. It is web marketing, problem solving and logic mixed together. Our website won’t rank if it doesn’t provide value to users. It is true that some established SEO professionals are actually bending the rule and some of their methods can be seen as manipulation. Of course, all of their actions are packaged as SEO campaign. We should know that unethical optimization techniques are achieved at any cost and they often provide only short term results. This could end up causing some bad effects, such as lower rankings or even banned domain name.
SEO companies are getting paid for achieving specific results. They are being pressured to achieve results in a predetermined duration of time. They usually have a SEO procedure to follow. They could implement X, Y and Z steps before moving on to other clients. In this case, they hope that their website could be ranked really well despite using the usual procedure. So it is important for us to determine good and bad things in the SEO industry. We should be aware of the inner working of SEO companies and we should avoid being badly burned by bad SEO campaigns. There are numerous forum debates and web postings that could offer us insights on how to do things properly.
Good SEO companies should have responsibility in achieving good results in proper ways. It is no secret that many companies are unable to achieve things properly. If SEO companies can’t guarantee proper steps, then we could risk getting penalized while losing money. This is one of the worst case scenarios in SEO industry. SEO companies can’t just guarantee that they will do the work, it is important for them deliver suitable results. SEO campaign is basically a marketing method, while a combination of no responsibility and secrecy could make the whole experience riskier. It is important to make sure that SEO companies are willing to reduce risks for their clients, while providing highest degree of service.
