Ethical SEO

What is ethical SEO (search engine optimization)? Well, the search engine optimization industry is no different from most other industries, in that there are certain companies that follow unethical approaches to obtain high rankings in search engines, this technique is commonly referred to as black hat SEO.

Ethical SEO companies are companies that follow the search engine's own guidelines for achieving better results and don’t try to fool the engines into giving them better ranking which invariably they find out about and penalize your website.
Once your website has been penalized it can be very difficult to rectify, so this is why you should always be careful which SEO company you hire. Here are some things to bear in mind when hiring a SEO company.

Keyword selection.

Some SEO firms will guarantee you first place positions in search engines, be wary of this as no company can guarantee you first place positions. This usually means that the company will select you keyphrases and give you no say in the selection process. These will probably be poor keyphrases and won’t help your business in achieving higher visibility or profitability.

Pagerank.

Ignore companies that focus on increasing your Pagerank, contrary to popular believes Pagerank is of little importance to you and your business. Good Pagerank is a by-product of good SEO. Too many people get a fixation on Pagerank for the wrong reasons. A high Pagerank doesn’t necessarily mean good visibility in the SERPS (search engine result pages).

Partnerships with search engines.

One common claim made from unethical SEO’rs is that they claim to have a special relationship with search engines. The only people that know the search engines secrets are the search engines themselves and they don’t share them with anyone. So, if a company claims this, it’s time to look elsewhere for your SEO requirements.

If you are looking for an ethical SEO company, I always found this company to be very good and will only use white hat SEO techniques.

This may all sound a bit worrying but there are far more ethical companies out there than unethical ones. Just a few bad apples can spoil it for the companies out there that are genuinely highly professional at what they do. Just remember to do some research before hiring a company. Ask them for examples of work they have done, contact some of their clients directly and ask if they are happy with the work that has been done, at the end of the day ethical SEO companies don’t have anything to hide and will gladly show you what they do and how they do it.