Ethical and unethical SEO

Ethical search marketing infers the use of strategies that both comply with published search engine quality guidelines and with appropriate community standards of behaviour. Normally, most enterprises will wish to use such methods to improve their website results, rather than utilise rapid result techniques that are less than honest, and in any case risky in the long term. There is a clear choice to be made between these two paths at every stage of the process of improving an enterprise's Internet presence; and therefore it is necessary to ensure that consultants only use recommended ethical strategies.

It is a little more difficult, technically, to comply with search engines' unpublished terms of service, which may in volume exceed the published ones; but this is achieved by trying to comply with the spirit of the guidelines. Large and complex websites may well present challenges here.

One may choose to search optimise a website by a range of methods that vary at one end from absolutely ethical and acceptable, through a large grey area, to completely unethical and semi-legal at the other end. These methods, and their adherents, are popularly termed white-hat (WH) or black-hat (BH), with a 'grey-hat' area in the middle.

Therefore, a choice needs to be made in the conduct of an SEO project, and in an SEO agency's business. There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods, but in the end, it's best to choose one side of the fence and stick to it. Since our clients are all respectable businesses, and as we achieved a large measure of honest success even in the first years of our search optimising efforts, it wasn't difficult to choose our path.

It is incorrect to state that black-hat SEO requires less skill than white-hat; or that it will inevitably result in a site being banned. Such statements indicate a lack of knowledge of SEO, whether BH or WH; and that the persons making such statements have never had to compete against skilled practitioners of the dark side. The fact is that they are sometimes highly skilled, and those who denigrate them simply have no experience. Skilled BH practitioners can not only compete very strongly in the toughest markets (and in markets where WH consultants would probably have no chance), but also remain undetected. Such skills cannot be discounted or devalued: they are very real and effective.

In fact the skills needed by top WH and BH practitioners are different; each requires a different skillset. A top white-hat consultant does not need to be a developer (or at least one of great skill and origination), but it is likely that there are few or even none in the successful BH world who are any less than competent coders - top BH practitioners are likely to be skilled developers. On the other hand a top WH consultant must have a very wide knowledge of Internet technology, marketing, usability and business; so the skills are probably different.

It is true that BH 'optimised' sites are frequently burned, that is to say discovered and deleted from their indexes by the search engines. Such websites are normally operated by novice or unlucky BH practitioners, since the skilled ones unfortunately often manage to stay below the radar for extended periods of time. These people are both clever and successful, and it would be unwise to discount them in any way; enterprises using ethical SEO services need to stay on the ball to succeed against them.

Ethical SEO agency

We are strictly an ethical SEO agency, and white-hat; however, we respect the abilities of the BH practitioners since we have to compete against them, and they are not to be dismissed easily. Search optimising via the honest route is a tough game at the best of times, and it would be easy to complain, or curse the 'alternative' crowd. But all's fair in love, war, and SEO - so we don't complain. Only beginners think that black-hat website development is always unsuccessful, the experts make a good living at it.

An ethical SEO company will always choose respectable and responsible ways to proceed at every stage. The two main areas of website results improvement - links and on-site optimising - both offer a multitude of options for honest or less-honest methodology. As an example, sites need a reasonable number of links in order to succeed. Such links, at least in the numbers required to place well in search results, cannot be acquired naturally by 90% of sites which in truth deserve them. It would take many years for links of sufficient number to be acquired organically. Therefore, professional assistance is often required in order to expedite the process. Of all the possible solutions here, the hardest and most time-consuming are the honest and ethical methods; rapid result techniques including the use of scripted applications or paying for links must be absolutely avoided by the respectable enterprise. Unfortunately, there are many offering search results improvement services who will use such methods, unknown to the client. The result is almost certainly a nasty shock, when the search engines realise what has been done - as they are bound to do eventually. By that time, the culprits have been paid and are long gone.

Recently, there have been cases where BH devs have taken over the top search positions on one or more of the major search engines, for several terms, in order to entice thousands of visitors to their websites and infect their PCs with badware. This is in association with botnet rings and similar activities (where vast numbers of PCs are taken over, and act as slave machines for PPC click fraud and so on). Because these people 'owned' the search results for multiple terms with large percentages of page 1 results, they were referred to in the trade press as "SEO Gods".

This scenario persisted for a couple of weeks or so until the search engines' anti-spam departments removed the offending sites. We, however, tend to think that a deity of search would be someone who could do that and stay there - and do it ethically. That's a little bit more of a challenge.

Ethical SEO fees and charges

We do not believe it is possible to optimise an online business for search in one shot, although in the case of a smaller new website this might be acceptable - at least pro tem. Therefore, we do not think it ethical to charge a one-off fee for a 'result', since this is - in our view - not a realistic proposition for most established sites. We think it takes more than one tranche of work to complete a project; so, for us, it would not be correct to charge a single fee and then leave the site after that work is completed.

Equally, we do not consider that most sites require an ongoing SEO commitment. The average commercial website is correctly referred to as the 'brochure' type, in that it represents the enterprise online, but does not sell directly, though orders may well be created by the site. Such sites, assuming them to be of less than 1,000 pages, do not normally require professional attention more than once or twice a year. Of course, sites with frequently changing content or products, and ecommerce sites, are a different matter; but they do not represent the majority.

Therefore, we are not prepared to charge a retainer fee, for most websites.

For these two reasons, most of our work is done in stages, and our fees reflect this. The majority of sites will require at least two stages to achieve our required standards, and larger websites, or those in tougher markets, will need more. We consider it better value for the client, more effective, more efficient in the long term, and certainly more ethical to work in this way. In our opinion one hit cannot do the job, and a monthly fee is not the best value for the client; and so we neither charge a single large fee at the start, nor an ongoing fee; and we do not try to maximise our income like this.

We believe that an ethical SEO company should not only provide ethical SEO services, but also organise and charge for their work ethically. Our staged payment system reflects this, as fees are always paralleled by results.

It is absolutely true to say that large and busy sites of any type will require some work every month. In many cases, this could be handled by the owner or staff, under instruction from the SEO consultant. A common time figure for this work might well be 8 hours, and these basic tasks - such as acquiring some links and checking page content for search compliance - could be carried out by in-house personnel. It all depends on content change frequency, and revenues: given a busy site and enough income, then any work done will simply generate more income and is worth doing. Small, quiet sites are a definite no-way here, so there is a point on the graph between the two where it starts to pay.

The search engine wars