I frequent many SEO and Web Marketing forums on a daily basis and every so often there’s a debate in regards to the SEO industry and ethics. After being involved in several these debates, it has become really obvious that the main issues are the facts that no two SEO companies are alike and there’s no unified methodology. It’s very difficult to create statements about a in general because it’s debatable what exactly’SEO’is. Mix in the truth that most SEO companies keep their methodology and campaign strategies secret and we have a predicament where every company is completely different with different results.
Fact 1 : There’s no unified SEO methodology. SEO is clearly defined by wikipedia as a procedure of improving traffic from SERPs to a site. Of course, HOW they do that is the real question and causes the debates.
Fact 2 : The effectiveness of an SEO campaign depends on the website structure, site content, keywords, methodology used, and how popular your website is. A website cannot just rank for just about any random keyword. SEO can be not voodoo. It is logic, problem solving, and Web marketing mixed together. If your website provides no value to users, it probably won’t rank.
Fact 3 : Some’SEOs’do se optimization and some do se manipulation. Of course, it is all marketed as SEO. Unethical optimization provides results at any cost and is obviously short-term (usually ends in a banned domain name). Ethical optimization opens up your website to the search engines and provides long term benefits.
Fact 4 : Most SEO companies get paid whether your website gets any rankings. Unfortunately, this is the case with the industry. Most SEO companies implement A, B, and C and proceed to the next client. Hopefully, your website ranks. When it doesn’t, they always have significantly more clients.
Fact 5 : Most SEO companies use both ethical and unethical inbound linking strategies.To maximize profits, it is very common for SEO companies to get bulk links from India, links on spam/scraper the websites, or sell large directory submission packages. It can be common for SEO companies to place huge levels of the contract into inbound linking to replace with the indegent quality of your website optimization.
I don’t believe that it is fair to characterize a in general without working out what’s wrong with it and how SEO companies can overcome it. So just how exactly do we determine what’s good and bad about a? I have now been associated with the Web for over 10 years and, specifically, with the SEO industry for almost 4 years and I’ve seen the inner workings of major SEO companies and worked with clients who’d been burned by their previous SEO campaigns. Combined with numerous Web postings and forum debates talking comparable basic problems, I’ve compiled a listing of the very common issues.