Ethical SEO is also referred to as White Hat SEO. It entails the practice of ethical, moral and correct techniques used for the purpose of optimizing search engine rankings.

In terms of natural or organic search engine optimization, ethical or white hat techniques are vital. Major search engines can easily spot any techniques that falls into their category of unethical practices and will penalize any website implementing them.

To Do List

• Link only with sites that are relevant to your own offerings
• Link only with sites that are practicing ethical SEO
• Link only with sites that are considered ‘above board’
• Create different links for each of your WebPages
• Increase the amount of inbound links
• Advertise your website via through social media websites
• Add blogs, press releases or any other articles that are reliable and interesting
• Keep your content unique, fresh and relevant

The Don’t Do list

• Avoid keyword stuffing
• Avoid exchanging links with low quality websites or with those that offer nothing of value
• Don’t copy from other websites
• Don’t hide text
• Don’t practice cloaking

The benefits to ethical SEO

• Does the least harm and the most good
• Ethical SEO promotes respect and dignity for all stakeholders
• Ethical SEO treats all stakeholder in a fair manner
• Ethical SEO help create a community where everyone can participate fully
• Ethical SEO helps develop characteristics which are deemed valuable by all involved in the community

The results of unethical SEO on the World Wide Web

Stakeholders involved in SEO comprise those searching for information, the search engine itself, those who own websites and whomever works for them or represents them and the entire World Wide Web. While everyone in some stage or form will be negatively affected by unethical SEO it is the World Wide Web which will ultimately be affected the most.

Whole ethical SEO refers to techniques, not to individuals those who practice ethical SEO must behave ethically towards their stakeholders.

Search engines are the bridge that links users to the World Wide Web. It is their job to improve and maintain search functions. If what they are putting out is junk as a result of unethical practices, they stand to lose their reputation and be overtaken by other search engines. The only way a search engine can become a leader is by offering searchers the means to find trustworthy and reliable search results. If they fail to produce consistently, they will lose trust and searchers will turn elsewhere.

The only way the entire World Wide Web community benefits from ethical SEO is by the behaviour of quality search engines. Searchers will be offered good and relevant results and will not be put in jeopardy by being deceived by misrepresented search results. The results of unethical SEO produce deceptive results.

Any industry that supports unethical practices that contribute to the deterioration of the World Wide Web should be penalized for the good of the whole. This includes site owners, webmasters, SEO professionals and the search engines themselves.

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