There are many sources of information related to SEO and we could frequent multiple forums and blogs on a daily basis to get new information in this field. Every so often, we could find debates about ethics and best practices in the SEO industry. After having an involvement in some of these debates, it could become quite obvious that there are not two SEO specialists who are alike and they may not use a unified methodology. In fact, it can be rather hard to create a statement about the whole SEO industry and its meaning can be rather debatable. Although there are some basic SEO techniques, they could keep their unique methodology. In fact, they may consider their campaign strategies as a secret. We could have a situation where SEO specialists use different methodologies to obtain the same results. Here are some facts about SEO industry that we may need to consider:
- There’s no unified SEO methodology and although SEO is generally defined as an activity to improve traffic by enhancing SERP, there are many approaches we could do to achieve that. The real question would be how we achieve this and this fact alone could cause debates.
- SEO campaigns may have different effectiveness: The effectiveness of a SEO campagn could depen on the how popular the website is, what methodology is used, how competitive is the keyword, how well the website is structured and whether the content is top-notch. A website couldn’t rank well using only arbitrary SEO methods and it is obviously not voodoo. SEO is very logical and it related to problem solving activity. Although we may have the most impressive SEO and online marketing campaign, our website may provide no value to users if it doesn’t contain valuable information.
- Some SEO methods rely on manipulation: During a SEO effort, some specialists may advertently perform some kinds of manipulation and it is all can be considered as a SEO attempt. Unethical could result in unwanted things in the long run and in some cases, our domain name can get banned. Ethical optimization should provide long term benefits both for website owners and users.
- SEO specialists want to get paid whether they provide desirable results or not: Unfortunately, there could be some unforeseen problems that could cause the website ranks less than expected. Hopefully, the website could rank well, but if it doesn’t SEO specialists still want to be paid. SEO activities still require some effort to complete and clients don’t always get what they want.
- SEO companies also use unethical linking strategies: It is quite common for some SEO specialists to purchase bulk links from developing countries at low cost to maximize profits and save time. This could result in poor optimization quality and much of the links’ values could be eradicated during the next algorithm update. It is important for us to get quality results and it would be better to have only a few dozen genuine links than thousands of useless ones.