The Truth About SEO

I frequent many SEO and Web Marketing forums each day and every often there is often a debate concerning the SEO industry and ethics. After being linked to a number of these debates, it is now really obvious that this main troubles are the facts that no two SEO companies are alike and there is not any unified methodology. It’s very challenging to make statements concerning the industry in general because it’s debatable just what ‘SEO’ is. Mix in the reality that most SEO companies keep their methodology and campaign strategies secret so we have a situation where every company is distinct with completely different results.

Fact 1 : There isn’t unified SEO methodology. SEO is in fact defined by wikipedia being a process of improving traffic from SERPs to some site. Of course, HOW they make it happen is the real question to result in the debates.

Fact 2 : The effectiveness of an SEO campaign depends upon the site structure, website content, keywords, methodology used, and exactly how popular your website is. A site cannot just rank for almost any random keyword. SEO can be not voodoo. It is logic, problem solving, and Web marketing mixed together. If your internet site provides no value to users, it in all probability won’t rank.

Fact 3 : Some ‘SEOs’ do search engine marketing and some do search results manipulation. Of course, means that marketed as SEO. Unethical optimization provides results no matter what and is always short-term (usually ends in a banned website). Ethical optimization opens up your website to the search engines like yahoo and provides extended benefits.

Fact 4 : Most SEO companies receives a commission whether or not your web site gets any rankings. Unfortunately, this will be the case while using industry. Most SEO companies implement A, B, and C and move on towards the next client. Hopefully, the web page ranks. If it doesn’t, they will have more clients.

Fact 5 : Most SEO companies use both ethical and unethical inbound linking strategies.To maximize profits, it is extremely common for SEO companies to acquire bulk links from India, links on spam/scraper sites, or sell large directory submission packages. It is usually common for SEO companies to position huge amounts of the agreement into inbound linking to create up for your poor quality of the website optimization.

I do not believe it is fair to characterize the industry overall without determining what is wrong with it and just how SEO companies can overcome it. So how exactly will we determine what is great and bad around the industry? I have now been involved using the Web for more than 10 years and, specifically, together with the SEO niche for almost 4 years and I’ve seen the inner workings of major SEO companies and caused clients who has been burned by their previous SEO campaigns. Combined with numerous Web postings and forum debates talking concerning the same basic problems, I’ve compiled a list with the most common issues.

Problem 1: Responsibility for Results

It’s no secret that this vast majority of SEO companies take no responsibility for results. It is undeniable that no SEO company can guarantee results (if they do, they can be lying to you personally). It can also be a fact how the client takes a risk by spending cash with an SEO company that truly says ‘We’ll do whatever we can’. SEO companies simply guarantee they’ll perform work to ‘optimize’ the website, but without full disclosure with their methodology, just what is your client paying for? No other industry sells an item with no guarantees no specific set of work which will be completed. Of course, SEO tasks are basically the sales of knowledge and keeping the specifics of a methodology is vital, though the combination of secrecy no responsibility for results really makes SEO campaigns risky. So, how could an SEO company decrease the risk for your client and offer the best grade of service?

Answer 1: Incentive Based Pricing

The main way to lessen the financial risk on the client is usually to share raise the risk. Through incentive-based pricing, the SEO company can charge a particular percentage with the total contract (say 70%) to pay for their intellectual property and time while placing the rest of anything price (remaining 30%) in incentives for achievement. Of course, incentives and percentage of the agreement would be totally relative with regards to the campaign. This first take on sharing in raise the risk provides both reassurance towards the client that this company believes rolling around in its methodology and places some in the financial burden from the campaign about the SEO company. At the moment, however, hardly any SEO companies are likely to share in the danger and charge a similar price whether the customer gets top rankings or no rankings in any way (or perhaps even lower rankings).

Problem 2: Unethical Optimization

Unfortunately, unethical (or blackhat) optimization continues to be very prominent about the Web. It’s also unfortunate that ‘SEO’ has become mistakenly mistaken for ‘Blackhat SEO’. This is the biggest problem for SEO companies. Saying that every SEO companies offer blackhat optimization is compared to saying everyone who emails is really a spammer. Blackhat optimization isn’t optimization whatsoever…it is search results manipulation. Because there is a whole lot money linked with top rankings, there is always a market for unethical SEO and search results spam. Until companies realize what exactly is ethical and unethical and quit supporting those blackhat SEO companies, they may continue to thrive. This makes the industry in general look bad and will not reflect the ethics of fine SEO companies. Blackhat provides fast, short-run results, but is rarely a good option inside long run.

Answer 2: Ethical Optimization

There is not any quick and easy answer to blackhat optimization’s stain within the SEO industry. I would suggest that most marketing departments research optimization techniques and educate themselves on what techniques are unethical. No SEO company will almost certainly say they actually unethical optimization. It’s also not economical for travel to immediately trust a firm or product based simply for their rankings. Unethical optimization DOES provide rankings…just not for that long run.

It would be also helpful if your major search engines like google would be more open and open to SEO companies. Currently, the major search engines like yahoo and SEO companies will not deal with 1 another and have formed sort of love-hate relationship. Because of this, many ethical SEOs have slowly moved into dark territory. Ethical optimization seeks to generate sites quicker accessible towards the engines and assist in improving the engine’s search engine results. The problem is that this search engines mainly clump all SEO companies together the identical way as uninformed users do: online search engine manipulation. This is merely the case. Search engines don’t want to reveal whatever they consider unethical given it would basically be providing a directory of holes of their algorithms that blackhat SEOs could be able to manipulate further, but a defined listing of ‘what to never do’ gives you a definitive list for businesses looking for an SEO company.

Basic Rules of Ethical Optimization

Any campaign that will not abide by the subsequent rules is contending with unethical optimization techniques and really should be avoided.

1.) What the user sees and what the search results sees must be exactly precisely the same. Do not hide anything.

2.) Your keywords (as well as the resulting optimization) should exactly reflect the content in the page.Keywords ought to reflect what your internet site is about.

3.) Do not build out pages exclusively for search engines like google. The site should cater to both audiences (users and engines like google). Catering to only users is the reason optimization is important. Catering only to search engines like google is optimization gone beyond the boundary into blackhat.

4.) Do not be involved in manipulative inbound linking schemes like link farms, bulk links, triangle linking, and other unethical manipulation of your respective Google PageRank or link authority. Inbound links needs to be relevant to your content of your blog and you must always know that’s linking to you personally and where your links originate from.

Problem 3: Assembly Line / Software SEO

With the growth with the SEO industry in addition has come the automation of SEO. The absolute initial thing any prospective SEO client should be aware is that each one effective SEO campaigns are custom. There isn’t checklist of products that will work exactly the identical on every site. If the SEO company claims there exists, then these are not doing full optimization plus the campaign is minimal. A good optimization campaign optimizes the web page architecture, text content, and code of your website. Assembly line SEO isn’t going to take into consideration the needs/design of the web page and may even provide blackhat optimization. SEO software especially must be looked at closely. There are really only 2 things SEO software could do this would work for just about any site: doorway pages (showing engines a very important factor and users some other thing; which can be unethical) or possibly a system of pages build exclusively for yahoo and google (known as info or information pages and linked inside an out in the way part in the page). Doorway pages are 100% unethical and info pages are deep within the gray area. Neither of people two methods address the architecture of your website, proper keyword analysis, or effective text content. The following links are instances of automated SEO software freely available within the Web. All links contain ‘nofollow’ to stop the sites from getting inbound link credit from my site. These sites are NOT recommended by TreeHouse SEM.