Its a dog-eat-dog marketplace out there. The web is teeming with millions of websites and yours is just another one of them. To rise above and ahead of this cut-throat competition, you need to work with an effective search engine marketing company that can put your website up among the top results in relevant keyword searches and help you reach out to your target audience.

Search engine marketing is vital for improving your sites conversion rate, attracting relevant traffic and maximising your Return on Investment (ROI).

Search engine optimisation is not an overnight job. It is a highly specialised and time consuming task. It may take months to get the desired results.

Although search engines issue broad guidelines, no one can say with certainty exactly how search engines rank websites. A professional SEO company has a good understanding of search engine behavior and experience in successfully achieving top ranking websites to advise you about the competition, ingredients, mechanisms and strategies that can be employed to make your website visible, frequently visited and a revenue generator.

The top 3 search engines, Google, Yahoo! and MSN, receive over 1.2 billion searches daily! Unless you use the correct search engine optimisation techniques with your website, you will not rank high with the search engines. Here is where the services of a professional search engine marketing company to handle your SEO campaign may help to deliver the desired results.

Search engines are strict about ethics

Search engines are clear in their guidelines about what they like and what they dont like. A good search engine optimisation company uses the specific sets of criteria laid down by search engines and their expertise gained over the years about what has worked in the past to increase the rankings of your site.

The SEO steps that abide by the search engine guidelines are called ethical and practices that are not approved by search engine guidelines are unethical.

Because search engines operate in an automated way, it is possible for webmasters to use methods not approved by search engines for better ranking. But these unethical attempts are fraught with risks.

Once your site is caught using unethical practices and banned by search engines, it will take a long time and a significant amount of effort to rank high in search engines again. Some SEO companies may use unethical practices to get high rankings of your website, but the results are only temporary. In fact they are devaluing your site.

Unethical search engine marketing companies do not consider the long term and want to show quick results to impress you. Hence, it is important to find an ethical SEO company that will ensure sustainable high search engine rankings.  

Unethical SEO Practices

It's disheartening that many companies claim to be in top rankings of search engine but the truth is many of them are hype.

If youre serious about your business, dont try to bluff the search engines. The unethical practices will be caught eventually, leaving your website far behind the competition.

Unethical practices used by search engine optimisation companies include:

Keywords stuffing: Unnecessary repetition of keywords in the content

Page swapping: A highly unethical practice where a webmaster copies a page from a high-ranking website, changes the title and description META tags, then submits this page to the search engines. Once a ranking is obtained, they replace the stolen page with one of their own web pages.

Copyright violation: Copying content of other websites without permission.

Irrelevant link exchange: Establishing reciprocal links with irrelevant websites for the sole purpose of increasing the number of links to your website.

How to select an ethical SEO company

Here are some tips for selecting an ethical SEO services company:

ü       Learn the basics of SEO: Study some basics of website promotion and search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques so that it will not be a new concept to you. These can be accessed easily on internet. Just spend little time to your research.

ü       Does it sound too good? Be wary if an SEO company offers ultra quick results. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is unethical. Both time and efforts are involved in the SEO process. There are no short cuts.

ü       Evaluate your needs: Evaluate which SEO program best fits your needs. You can evaluate this by checking sales conversions, log reports, and so on. You must discuss your objectives with the SEO services provider then analyze yourself, how good it would be for serving your purpose.

ü       Guarantee: Make sure that the search engine marketing company gives you some level of guarantee for their services. But, be wary of companies that offer a #1 ranking guarantee. No one has that much control over Google, and it is a sure sign that they may use unethical practices.

ü       Experience: Check the industry experience of the people behind the company and also get feedback from the references given.

ü       Strategies: When you choose to optimise your website, you need to look at the methodology a search engine optimisation company would be using. Ask the SEO company about the strategies they are going to use to optimise your website...

ü       Cost: You usually get what you pay for. An offer for 500 links for 29 is a possible sign of unethical practices.

You need to keep in mind these few points while you research SEO services for your website. Return on investment (ROI) can depend on several factors, such as the size of your market place, geographical target area, the sales value of your products/services and the number of people searching online for your products/services.

Searching for an authentic ethical SEO company is a time consuming task. But remember that its not simply enough to only achieve better search engine rankings. Your website needs to be designed in a way to ensure you convert your visitors into buyers to boost your sales and revenues and increase your brand recognition.

Philip Shaw is the Director of CleverClicks, a leading Australian search engine marketing company, providing result-oriented SEO and PPC services.

Contact mail@cleverclicks.com.au or call on 61-2-8003-5664.