How can competition and ethics in the highly charged and competitive realm of SEO be compatible? When trying to turbo charge that commercial web site with keywords, why not pull out all the stops and get the visits that lead to a dominant web presence? After all, there are billions of web pages out there competing for the next pass of the Google and Bing web crawlers. Don’t the ends justify the means?
The first “leg” is self-interest.
Think about this: Trying to load a web site with SEO keywords that are either misleading or embedded in a poor web design will have the directly opposite effect. Web crawlers are on the lookout nowadays for SEO abuse. The aforementioned opposite effect would be that the offending web site could be relegated in priority or omitted altogether from any search results.
Google is getting serious.
Google, for example, has embarked on an effort to target “overly SEO’d” web sites. Google’s Matt Cutts heads up the search spam effort and announced last March that “Google is releasing an algorithm update specifically to target sites over doing their SEO.”
Cutts explains: “We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and a great site.”
The second “leg” is an SEO code of ethics.
Bruce Clay has come up with a code of ethics for SEO practitioners and web site designers. Clay’s approach is centered on the obvious self-interest of SEO service providers, which is “to assist clients in obtaining higher rankings for client pages.” He advocates voluntary compliance to a code of ethics that states what SEO practitioners must avoid the following:
- harming a client through practices that could get the client banned from search engines
- violating search engine and directory rules
- misleading, harming or offending a consumer through tactics like “bait and switch”
- violating copyright, trademark or existing state, federal and international spamming laws
- misrepresenting the content of a client’s site
- plagiarizing or representing the work of others as their own
- falsifying their abilities, experience, education, membership in trade associations, etc.
- participating in a conflict of interest without notifying everyone involved.
- setting unreasonable client expectations.
Lastly, the SEO Code of Conduct enjoins SEO practitioners to:
- provide dispute resolution mechanisms.
- protect client confidentiality and anonymity.
- work diligently for their clients always with the goal of increasing of retaining of the clients’ web sites.
We are the third “leg.”
So it is possible to compete ethically on the web. Contact us and see how Art Schobey interactive adds the “third leg” to your Internet marketing solutions. That would be coming up with the great web design that uses the best and most ethical SEO approach.