Everything you wanted to know about ethical and unethical SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has evolved as one of the significant e-marketing strategies. Nevertheless, as with every strategy and business process, SEO can also be done unethically. Being an effective brand awareness tool, SEO Marketing is carried out unethically by many search engine optimizing specialists to get quick results. Let us first get a basic overview of what do we mean by optimizing websites for search engines.

SEO: An overview

Put simply, SEO, as an e-marketing strategy, is used to optimize websites so that they can rank better on leading search engines such as Yahoo, Google, and Bing. The higher a company’s website ranks on these search engine pages, the more its chances are to get high-quality traffic and potential business.

The science of website optimization is about enabling a website’s target audience/visitors and search engines to find it easily. Every search engine optimizing tactic enables business website to use keyphrases or keywords that are similar to what the target audience intends to type. Now, let us understand the difference between ethical and unethical SEO.

Ethical search engine optimizing tactics

Also referred to as white hat, Ethical SEO comprises techniques that are accepted and standardized to optimize a website. The white hat tricks, in general, suggest that a business has optimized its website honestly. Following are key white hat tricks:

• Every webpage should have a separate link.
• Content and keyword present in a website should be relevant to the user.
• A website requires to be updated periodically with relevant information.
• The keywords should not be dated, and they should be used sufficiently throughout the content.
• A website’s sitemap should be designed in such a way that it can be easily found by search engine spiders.

Unethical search engine optimizing strategies

Unethical SEO is referred to as black hat tricks. Now, let us view which all practices fall under the black hat tricks.

• In general, the most common type of black hat trick is hidden text. Sometimes, search engine optimizing specialists work hand and glove with webmasters to type keyword-heavy content in minute white font and hide it behind a white background.
• Sometimes, a few businesses use automated queries without getting permission from search engines.
• Many websites are in the habit of link trading. Trading links can be often misleading to an online user.

Apart from SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC) is other way that enables a site to draw heavy traffic. Every leading online marketing company offers result-oriented SEO and PPC services. Thus, it is advisable to go for an internet marketing company that offers ethical search engine optimizing services.