Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Search Engine Optimization for Professionals

While search engine optimization can provide a legitimate source of traffic optimization, reports show that several companies resort to less than ethical strategies. or that it's important to hire only "ethical SEO consultants" or "ethical search engine marketers". In all circumstance, it’s best to keep sight on which SEO companies provide a legitimate service, and which strive for quick profits by using shady techniques. This is true in all industrys, not just SEM. If the people in our industry can remember this when trying to create a SEM Company (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. What would you do if one such misinformed customer asked for something like a set of 10 entry domains liking their website. They stubbornly refuse your advice to make modifications to their actual website, and they insist that you only work from the “fringes”.

As you should know, such pages would be found by search engines simply because you’d get a sitemap of the doorway package, and get it reclusively linked to the real website you’re promoting. When the user arrives at one of the doorway pages via search engines, they’re forced to click an extra time to get through to the actual website they were looking for in the first place. Should you get faced with such a customer, what would you prefer: compromising your views of proper search engine optimization, or just give the customer what he thinks is better? It’s not as if the compliance with such a task would necessarily be regarded as unethical. On the other side, you might have noticed how the actual website already includes a good deal of content? 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 you need to choose between doing the right thing and just making a quick buck, you should always chose the first. If you can’t convince a customer he’s trying to implement a bad and pointless technique, it’s best to let him go. It goes without saying that turning down easy money like that may sound troublesome. After all, you could actually generate those pages automatically using software...but you’d actually be giving what he’d ask for, correct? You probably can think of several ways you could have justified yourself, if you’d have conceded. What kind of and SEO consultant will you be, if you aren’t capable of achieving actual results? If the buyer wanted help with a useless technique, supporting his whims would only stain your reputation. You shouldn’t regret about losing such a client, because he’ll hardly help your career progression.

As an SEO professional, your opinion is your currency. For the sake of your business, you don’t want to hold on to clients who don’t value your opinion. You may lose some money on the short run from turning down this kind of customer… but on the long run, it’ll more than pay off. It worked for me!

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