Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) should at all times be carried out in an ethical way so that the Search Engine Placement of the client website will be on the first page of a list of organic search engine results. These results will normally come after a list of sponsored sites that are applicable to the search keyword(s) typed in.
The method by which a search engine, e.g. Google, decides which web sites are relevant to the keyword(s) submitted for search, is by having earlier indexed the pages and stored the results in a database. Thus by searching the index for the keyword(s) a fast response is assured, usually in less than a second.
The search engines use a program to do the indexing, known as a robot or spider, and these robots have been engineered and refined to distinguish unethical practices that they find on web pages, which they may well then leave out from the database. In some cases the web site may be excluded as a whole.
The robot values the web pages by several methods: The amount of times a keyword is listed on a page, and the amount of times other sites link to the page.
For clients operating Online Marketing services, it is important that their web sites have longevity as they may well support lots of other clients.
Keywords:
Unethical Practice:
Keyword Stuffing is an unethical exercise of repeating a keyword lots of times in a web page, typically by using text that is the same colour as the background so that it won’t be seen by a visitor but will be identified by the robot.
This can also be done for keywords in Meta tags in the html head of the web page coding.
Ethical Practice:
Ethical techniques focus on what the user experience will be, so the page content should be significant to the page title and the page title should reflect the link that was used to reach it, as well as the actual content. Content should be carefully written in good English with no spelling or grammatical errors, and should highlight the product or service that the page is about. Keywords should be part of the typical flow of text and repeated only as often as sensible reading allows. For keywords in Meta tags a unique list of keywords should be used.
Links to the page:
Unethical Practice:
An unethical business may create what are known as Doorway Pages, where the content is probably just keyword stuffing and a link to the promoted web site.
Ethical Practice:
The ethical approach is to create significant pages that can be made sense of by a user and have links to the client site.
If looking for a SEO Company, ascertain which methods they use before committing yourself to their services.