SEO Ethics
With almost everything in life, there is a right way and a wrong way to accomplish your search engine goals. Easier isn’t always better, and using techniques that are meant to mislead search engines (and site users) are always wrong. Search engines are strict about this, as proven by the changes to Google’s spam response.
The secret to a powerful SEO strategy that won’t get your site blacklisted is simple; put your site visitors first. Always. The exact specifications and requirements for SEO change regularly, but there are never any changes that encourage you to do something that will hurt your site visitors.
SEO ethics is becoming a larger concern around web communities because there are so many ways to trick the system and move your website to a higher position on the SERPs, without necessarily having a better website. Cloaking and other black hat SEO techniques work very well, for a while, and that makes them very attractive to many website owners who may not be as familiar with the correct way of performing SEO.
The problem is that some areas of the web and business communities are starting to see SEO as a spam technique. It’s not. When done correctly, SEO not only makes your website more user-friendly, but it also works hand in hand with the way search engines function. It makes it easier for search engines to find the information they need to classify and correctly list your website in the search engine indexes. This improves your site’s visibility, as well as giving users a better experience when they arrive on your site.
The basic techniques of SEO are better content (using keywords, headlines, bulletin points, ect.), better linking practices (using appropriate anchor text, not misleading users), better accessibility (tagging pictures correctly), and better navigation and design. All of these things help search engines when they are scanning through your content, but the real benefit is for web users. The search engines are set up to place the best, most relevant web pages in the highest positions in the search engine result pages. It doesn’t always happen that way, but as SEO guidelines improve, so do the results available to search users.
SEO is not spam. It isn’t intended to “beat the system”, and unfairly give some site an advantage over others. It is a tool, and like most tools it can be abused. The secret to making sure your site’s SEO is done with SEO ethics in mind is to work with an experienced SEO team or to learn as much as you can about the proper techniques before you begin performing SEO on your site yourself.
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