What are Ethical SEO Techniques?

There have always been organic or ethical SEO techniques since the earliest days of the internet any conscientious search engine positioning company worth their salt will provide this. The impetus behind these “white-hat” techniques is to provide customers with a high quality and value for money service whilst helping them to achieve their end objective of a high search engine ranking. However there is some confusion over what constitutes organic or ethical SEO as there is no law or approved framework to work to.

Above all content is king, providing quality content either on-site or offsite is the surest way to provide organic growth. Search engine spiders love to revisit sites where content is regularly changing and attractive. “White hat” techniques are any ways of working that ensure there is transparency for customers and accountability by the company providing the optimisation service.

An ethical SEO approach ensures that intellectual property rights are protected and no false claims are made over anything that has been provided to the owner of the site. It could also be argued that providing a value for money is also an ethical approach as sometimes customers may be limited in their knowledge of technical matters and that any fees charged should be consistent with the effort expended. Any ethical approach on some occasion will mean advising the potential customer to the correct way of optimisation when they are considering a non ethical approach due to maybe financial pressures to achieve a short term gain.

Other advice that would be consistent with an ethical approach would relate to advising on the requirements and implementation of a privacy policy to ensure that it adheres to either local privacy legislation or conventions.

Security is another part of providing ethical advice, although not strictly an SEO activity it is still important where you are aware of potential failures on the client site that you are promoting to ensure that they for instance utilise a digital certificate where payment details or customer information is being collected online.

Our experience with business owners running sites requesting to be achieve high rankings is that if you are open and honest explaining exactly what you are providing for them, including a setting a realistic expectation of where they can hope to rank. This is what they would prefer. In this industry there are many who are trying to ensure that the industry operates in this manner, you just have to look.