Search Engine Optimization
by admin : last updated: January 22, 2009Companies which actively spam search engines seeking higher rankings are less than ethical; still many SEO forums and newsletters demonstrate there is more than a few such companies. However, negative impact is likely to be caused (sooner or later) by unethical SEO techniques; for this reason, one should be mindful in dealing only with honest search engine consultants.
Since the use of subversive optimization strategies will be likely to cause dire results in the long run, the real issue is telling apart genuine SEO professionals from people who care about nothing but easy profit. This is true in all industrys, not just SEM. If the people in our industry can remember this when trying to create a professional SEO organization (and there are many factions trying to do this), it will go a lot smoother.
Prospective clients are known to sometimes bear an unhealthy stance towards search engine optimization, as result of information they’ve read somewhere else. They ask you for a proposal to create 10 doorway pages for their site. However, they’ll simultaneously deny that you mess their actual site; they’re only interested in getting pages that will operate on the “fringes”.
Such doorway pages would be easily found by search engines since you’d group them with a sitemap and get it discreetly linked somewhere down below the actual homepage. Such pages are grouped together to lure search engines, but they provide real users with nothing but disservice: once they get to one of the doorway pages, they have to make an extra click to get to the actual site. If you’d get confronted with this scenario, what would you choose: merely giving the customer what he wants, or take the effort of standing up to what you believe in, as far as website optimization is concerned? Granted, it’s not as if creating those pages would be necessarily considered unethical. But… what if you had noticed how there was actually a great selection of content pages in the actual website? They really don’t need to add doorway pages, they just need to tweak their current content a bit to make sure they’re using words that real people use when searching.
Whenever dealing with this kind of customers, I always try to persuade them how wrong, pointless and ineffective their chosen strategy would be. Should I fail in doing so, I won’t hesitate to turn down the client. It’s not as if it’s pleasant to let such easy money go somewhere else. If you think about it, this kind of task could be performed nearly automatically using the right software…and you’d just be giving the customer exactly what he asked for? It’s easy to think of reasons you could convince yourself it would be okay doing it. If you expect to be regarded as professional SEO, you should always keep your eyes set on doing effective optimization. You shouldn’t regret about losing such a client, because he’ll hardly help your career progression.
Customers who undermine your professional opinion are negligible. Seriously, the money you lose from declining that type of work will be made up in so many different ways. You can gaurentee it!