Ethical SEO Agency

At its core Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is the task of making a website search engine friendly, or more simply put, easier for search engine robots to crawl and discover what the site is all about. In recent times the term has also come to mean any activity that promotes your site and helps it move up Google’s search engine results pages. Most companies realise that being listed above others when someone types in their product or service can do wonders for their bottom line and with this in mind they want to know more. A few Google searches later and things can appear very confusing indeed. Lots of talk of different coloured hats for example, as well as various other things like cloaking, which only makes you think of Star Trek. Most of these things could be categorised under either ethical or non-ethical SEO, so which one is it?

Google’s Dilemma

In fact if Google doesn’t look to improve constantly and spot the attempted deceptions then it could start to return all sorts of irrelevant results and I’d guess most of us would stop using it. What happens frequently in SEO is people try and ‘keep up’ with Google’s updates and develop new, weird and wonderful ways of deceiving the robots that are used to gather the information on sites.  Really what we should all be doing is asking Google to adapt and recognise the good things we do that it can’t already ‘see’. Websites should be pushing the boundaries in terms of user experience and interactive content.  In fact Google and other search engines should be struggling to keep up with our latest updates not the other way around. If you can do that, then it will take time and effort, Google knows this, and when it does find a way of ‘seeing’ how good you are, it will reward you for it. Fred should probably look at providing his current visitors with what they can’t get elsewhere and give them the information they need to make an informed decision. That’s tough and Google knows it.

Most people know they want search engine optimisation!

They also know they don’t want to do anything that would drop them out of favour with Google in the near future, even if it does get them a bit of a ‘quick win’. The main reason we see most people turning to non-ethical SEO is because of time constraints. It take a lot of planning time and effort to make a site popular. The mistake commonly made is to set up a website as a bit of a ‘shop window’ with static information that never changes. Site owners will then simply wait for people to find their site while twiddling their thumbs. After some time may be a month or six, the site starts to become a cost to them rather than something that sends them business and makes them money. In order to make the figures still work they therefore have to keep the site live with a very small budget. Of course they want the situation to improve and may be they decide to employ an SEO agency to help move the site up the rankings and generate more business for them. Generally because ethical SEO is harder to do it will take more time and therefore more budget, so with that in mind agencies that have non-ethical practices are often used as they offer cheaper packages. This is a typical scenario that I see occuring all the time. I’m going to try and outline how having a slightly different view can mean choosing the right options for your site in the long term, and ultimately could save you the money in the long run – money that  you have to spend trying to rectify the damage non-ethical practices can cause that is.

Take a step back

In my experience this should be looked at from a completely different angle. Google for one knows how difficult it is to write unique content and create a site that is engaging enough that users want to come back to it, will bookmark it and will in some cases even link to it from their own site. This is exactly why Google rewards you so handsomely for doing the hard bit.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the old saying that time is money, and this is as true when applied to website activities as many other aspects of life and work. It take a long time to effectively plan a good article, brainstorm ideas, bullet point what you want to say, write the content and proof read it before unleashing it on your site. Again this is something that, if you do correctly, will set you apart from the crowd, and because it clearly takes time and effort for you to share your expert knowledge with your users, Google will notice that and help you to share it with the rest of the web.

So, it goes without saying that content for your site is a huge part of good ethical SEO, but what are the other aspects?

Links. We all know we want them, we all know Google looks at who’s linking to you but how should you go about getting these in an ethical way? If someone has a site then effectively they have the right to recommend whomever they want, by the way of linking to them that is. Let’s say I have a site with some information about my experiences with building computers. Some of the information on my site talks about where to get the best computer parts from and in particular some snazzy LED lights to go inside the PCs I’m building.  Would it then make sense that I might want to recommend some retailers to my users via the use of a link straight to where I got my lights from? Of course it does. That’s the right thing to do to help my users in their quest to build better, or at least more interesting PCs.

Of course all of this activity takes time. It takes a lot of time to write good content as we mentioned before and it takes even more time to convince others with decent sites to recommend you for things. If however you do take the time to plan what you’re going to populate your site with and how you’re going to encourage others to link to you and recommend the information available on your site, you will have something in place that lasts much longer, and gives you much more favour with Google and other search engines.

There are many different activities that can cause your site to see a sharp jump in positions/ranking in the search engines. These kind of surges in popularity are often treated by Google and other search engines as ‘news’ initially. If something suddenly becomes popular over night then it makes sense that it would be something like an event. The problem with this is that, after a short honeymoon period, the site in question would fall out of favour again, similar to the way that news becomes old. Using the more ethical methods I mentioned earlier you will be constantly giving Google and the like, signals that you are ‘always’ popular and good at what people constantly recommend you for. This is therefore much more sustainable and will see your high rankings stay intact for a much longer period of time.

So how does this all play out in real terms?

Going back to our earlier scenario let’s imagine that they didn’t employ a cheap SEO firm and they planned out a good budget for some slightly more expensive SEO practices. Three months in and I wouldn’t expect much to have changed, but signs that things are starting to improve are there.  Six months in and the site is now generating a steady flow of visitors due to the awesome information that has built up over the last six months. Another six months in and the site has become so popular that the traffic has gone through the roof, with enquiries coming from all angles. Other sites that decided to use the spammy link building tactics or similar strategies had a great few weeks during the first 3 months, but then Google fell out of favour with their ‘news’ and so they built more spammy links, which Google noticed through their algorithm because there are now enough of them to tip the balance and get the site caught in the ‘filter’. The next 6 months are spent trying to clean things up, and although this is successful, the site is now back to square one. Meanwhile the site that employed Ethical SEO services is doing so well budget is simply no longer an issue. I know where I’d rather be.