I came across a very interesting article this week regarding Internet Marketing saying Search Engine Optimisation was cheating.
Firstly let’s think about it, we know that there are ethical and unethical methods to SEO but to say that Search Engine optimisation is cheating is what companies say when they can’t do it. Search engine Optimisation should not be about cheating the results but making it so that you provide the most relevant result to the user which is what the Internet is all about.
On the internet Content is King, but link popularity is also a huge factor for your search engine rankings. So if cheating is writing your content correctly or designing your site so that the information can be read correctly then I think we have a problem. The way we see it, is we should advance websites into the next century, they have to be created to standards. Standards of code, accessibility, content and links are will prevail in Google.
Neil Walker
Head of Internet Marketing
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »
Some of the design department were having a discussion about ethical search engine optimisation today. The focus of the discussion was which methods are considered to white hat and which are black hat. This is an important issue for us, as we practice ethical search engine optimisation. In most cases the distinction is clear cut: deceptive optimisation techniques such as hidden text and spammed alt tags are a bad idea and could cause your site to be dropped by the search engines. There are, however, a number of grey areas.
Scrolling boxes, for example, are a perfectly ethical method for containing text. But what if the box height is too small for the text to be easily read? Is this considered to be black hat, and if so, at what point does the box become too small? Another example is the use of javascript to hide text from the spiders. To increase keyword density for selected phrases, you could display all non-beneficial text through javascript. This text would not be seen by spiders, which means that the spiders would see less text on the page, and think that your page had better densities for the keywords that are not hidden. Is this ethical?
Please let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment.
Dave Stewart
SEO Consultant
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »
