Forge Search Marketing

The Efficacy of Ethical SEO

As an ethical SEO company, it is unfortunate that we have to fight to remain distant from the negative connotations associated with general SEO practitioners. In recent years, the marketing power of a properly organized and executed SEO campaign has become common knowledge amongst business owners and as an unfortunate result, many have experienced a less than ideal business partnership with some companies. To make matters worse, companies are unaware that the techniques many of these practitioners use are not only expensive, but highly damaging to your brand and business. In this article, we aim to shed some light on the shady SEO industry by exposing certain common methods that are used and how to diagnose them, what proper SEO methods are, and how ethical SEO future-proofs your company’s online presence in respect to search.

The Bad: Common “Black Hat” Practices

Despite the many anti-spam ordinances that have been made by search engine figureheads such as Google’s Matt Cutts, there are still several unethical, black hat techniques used by search marketers to bolster the performance of their clients’ websites. Unfortunately, search engines are not quite to the point where all of these methods are automatically caught and penalized and they rely heavily on human reporting, but this doesn’t mean that they have not drastically improved over the years. Below are some of the most common black hat practices still in use:

• Keyword Stuffing – A common attribute to many spam sites is that they “stuffed” with the same keywords over and over. In one of our recent consultations with Jonathan Jonas of Sober.com, we found that his competition had words such as “addiction” as many as 150 times on a single page that only contained around 800 words. The goal here is to make search engines think that the page is extremely relevant to the word “addiction”, when in actuality the information is more or less useless.
• Invisible/Hidden Text – If you’ve ever looked at the footer or source code of a website, you may have seen text that was the same color as the background, or hidden from view with CSS. This text is simply meant to hide what would otherwise hinder the user experience, but to trick the search engines into thinking there is more relevant content on the page than there really is. For the most part, search engines are fairly adept at detecting this and penalize heavily for it, often banning the sites from indexation.
• Link Building Bots/Programs – We’ve mentioned before that inbound links should take quality as a priority over quantity, but having a plethora of inbound links from thousands of different domains can be effective in some scenarios. Link building programs or bots often post generic, anchor text optimized comments and links on blogs or automate the submission of a website to thousands of low-quality directories in an effort to garner rankings for a targeted keyword. While this used to be a way to obtain first page Google rankings in a matter of days, there are now penalties in place for websites that see huge bursts in inbound links from non-credible sources. You can use Yahoo’s Site Explorer to see how many incoming links there are to your site and see if your SEO company is using a program to build links, rather than doing so manually.
• Doorway Pages and Websites – Pages on a website that are stuffed with certain keywords but not visible to users are known as “doorway pages”. The objective is to have search engines pick up on these “highly relevant” pages and drive traffic to them, even if they provide no real context to the site they are on. Using the example of “addictions” we mentioned above, the site in question had a doorway page for each type of addiction simply for the purposes of tricking the search engines. This concept applies to entire websites or website networks as well, where the site provides no real content of value and simply links back to a parent site. It is important to check your website Analytics so that you can see where you traffic is coming from. If you notice there are a several obscure, spam-oriented sites sending you traffic, you might want to address your SEO company.

The Good: Common “White Hat” Practices

Now that you know what to look out for when it comes to shady SEO practices, you should know the methods by which an ethical SEO company will improve your website’s performance. Note the difference in how ethical SEO methods prioritizes organization, research and quality over spam and quantity.

• On-Page Optimization – We recently wrote an article that describes how you can properly research and organize information on your site to be the most search engine friendly, but the overall goal of on-page optimization is to appropriately target specific keywords because they apply to your brand and your target audience, NOT just to garner traffic. A targeted audience that arrives at a well designed, cleanly organized website is much more likely to convert (purchase, signup, etc.) from you than bulk traffic who arrived from some obscure corner of the internet.
• Unique Content Creation – One of the most central ways to getting targeted traffic is creating content that will appeal to your target audience. Blogging, videos, podcasts, and tweets are all extremely important when it comes to attracting people interested in your product or service and helping search engines to determine a clear theme for your website. Neglecting other factors, if your site has 200 pages in total all discussing different types of running shoes, new running shoe product lines, video promotions and other relevant content, it is going to rank higher for the related topics than a site that has 40 completely different topics. Furthermore, creating content on your topic allows you to demonstrate that you are an expert within your niche and therefore are likely to be referred to by your visitors.
• Natural Link Building – While creating unique content may result in a multitude of natural inbound links, ethical SEO campaigns often require you to work to obtain the links manually. Natural links are varied from several different sources and are not all optimized with certain keywords that you are targeting. Natural link building is the result of good networking with other webmasters, bloggers, and journalists in your industry that want to link to you because you’re an authority. Moreover, the goal of these links is to be placed on sites that have the most authority and credibility with search engines already so that you are associated with them, rather than a network of spam blogs. You can find a good resource on beginner’s link building here on our blog.

Ethical SEO and Future-Proofing Your Campaign

While search engine algorithms can and do change on a regular basis, those that have employed ethical SEO methods generally have very little to fear when it comes to their rankings and overall campaign performance. We and other SEOs have seen a multitude of documented cases where websites go from front page rankings to page 5 rankings (or even de-indexation) overnight, all as a result of their shady methods being discovered. Unfortunately, in many cases the company that is suffering the loss did not realize that their SEO firm had employed such methods, which is why it is important to read the aforementioned list of black hat SEO techniques.

Just as you wouldn’t build a physical storefront with shoddy materials that are forbidden by the building code, you don’t develop an SEO campaign with shoddy practices. The last thing a company needs to do is invest a large sum of money in development, only to have to pay another contractor to rebuild everything once the “building inspector” (Google) comes by and closes the “store” (your website) down.

The central reason that ethical or “white hat” SEO practices are endorsed and advocated by search engines is that it allows the content on the web to be organized and identified in the best possible manner, which supports their main objective. There will always be those that attempt to “cheat the system” by tricking the search engines, but over the course of time these methods have and will continue to be identified, brushing away the spam from search results and uncovering the truly helpful, quality content.