Hundreds and thousands of people have made use of the Internet in a variety of ways, each in an attempt to subjugate its great power and potential to give profit and gain to users and businessmen. However, alongside the aims of these hardworking innovators and entrepreneurs are people who simply want to extort as much money from people in exchange for dubious products and services.
Web content is brought to a potential user by means of either direct recall of a particular service provider's website, or by blind searches done on various Internet search engine platforms made available by Internet software giants. By entering words, known as 'keywords' relevant to the desired information, product, or service, into the search field, users can employ these blind searches to look for content closest to what they are looking for.
As is the practice, a search engine usually produces a list of websites matching the keywords provided by the user to a degree of relevance. These are ranked by relevance, quality of content, and sometimes, 'visitor votes' that come in the form of a measure of frequency of visits by people who usually find the content useful to them.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a method used by many businesses and entrepreneurs online in order to maximize the potential of the search engine by helping them rise in the ranks of the query response listings. SEO usually deals with organic searches, or those that need no payment to be listed among the list of likely matches to a client's keywords, as well as crawler search engines, which are search engines that literally crawl through web pages in search of relevant links and relations between pages in order to find relevant content.
Dubious figures in the Internet, however, have made use of the Internet to forward their own selfish desires, leading to an unethical use of the brilliant SEO model. This has led to a divergent field of SEO, called "black hat SEO". In this method, various deceptive schemes are used in order to manipulate search engines and dupe customers by providing them with websites that are completely useless. This method is also called "spamdexing".
Ethical SEO techniques also exist in the Internet. Before even going into details, the most important ideal behind ethical SEO techniques is in providing better service to clients, and allowing this satisfaction to become key in promoting the website.
What does it take for a method to become an ethical SEO technique?
There are various ways under the central guideline to achieve them.
The first one is creating quality content for the users. After all, no ethical SEO technique tries to get the better of any customer, or even harm them to the slightest extent. By providing quality content, users receive useful, timely, and secured information when they need it.
In order for that to be achieved, no amount of exaggeration or manipulation of the nature and content of the website is done to lead customers into believing that it contains the website relevant to their query. Ethical SEO does not employ any method that will mislead the customer into a site, and even offend the customer once he or she has found his or her way into the website.
Moreover, ethical SEO techniques do not, in any way, violate any laws as regards intellectual property rights, international law, or spamming laws implemented at every level of every way. This would include not claiming for their own products and services that are not theirs to sell or produce just so they can fool users into providing sensitive information through which they can extort money.
A website employing ethical SEO techniques will never try to exaggerate and reflect a company's image any more than how it should be portrayed; doing so, in effect, manipulates the customer into trusting a company based on falsity.
Relevant to various security issues existent on the Internet, one last measure of how ethical a SEO technique is lies in the protection of its customers on the basis of privacy agreements. In providing the service sought by the client, ethical SEO techniques protect the confidentiality and sensitivity of the information made known to them in confidence by their clients.
Both goals aim to achieve the same end of profit. However, the road diverges and one must pick one over the other. In the end, ethical SEO techniques allow for users to maximize the profit they pay without impinging on the rights of other people an manipulating others; this by far is the best option to go.
