by Irene Lizarraga

Created on: July 29, 2010   Last Updated: August 19, 2010

Ethical search marketing or White Hat SEO means using only search engine optimization techniques and strategies that follow the search engines guidelines to get websites ranked higher on the Search Engines result pages. It involves things such as legitimate link building, great website navigation and architecture and useful content, and avoids cheats and tricks such as displaying different content to users than to search engines. Unlike Black Hat seo, it doesn't focus on tricking the search engines but on bringing high quality targeted traffic to the optimized website. The goal of ethical SEO is, at the end of the day, a satisfied visitor that will stay on the page.

The goal of an ethical social marketing professional is generating relevant traffic to a particular website, without negatively affecting the visitor’s user experience. For example, an ethical social marketing strategy  won’t try to optimize a website about cheese for keywords such as “Word Cup 2010” just to get traffic crazy about football. A black Hat SEO, the polar opposite of ethical search marketing professionals, would not hesitate to use tactics such as cloaking, farm links and keyword stuffing just to get visitors to their website. The fact that those perplexed visitors are going to immediately leave the website without buying any cheese doesn’t matter. Unethical search marketing is all about getting the traffic, either to impress a confused client with high traffic numbers or first page results in Google, or to display advertisement or malware.

One of the most important things about ethical search engine marketing is that it doesn’t guarantee things over which the marketeer has no control, such as first page position in Google, and doesn’t focus on quick results. Writing quality content and getting quality links from other websites in the same niche is not a short term strategy, and everybody knows cheating is much quicker. However it offers long lasting results that unethical SEO cannot imitate. Make no mistake, ethical search marketing is, after all, marketing. It involves actively working towards positioning for specific keywords even if the product or website behind them is not the market leader. However, there’s a difference between offering keyword rich information to a visitor and creating machine generated keyword stuffed text just to draw traffic.

While working within the guidelines of the Search Engines can be much more difficult and requires considerably more effort, ethical social marketing sticks to them and focuses on generating quality content and links instead of gaming the system. That puts professional ethical search marketing agencies on a though spot when clients insist that somebody else has promised them first position on every existing Search Engine, for any possible keyword. However, website owners that know their way about SEO end up spending their time or money on ethical search engine marketing strategies, because doing otherwise is wasting it. The consequences of black hat SEO range from disappointed visitors, useless traffic that wastes bandwidth and server resources or even removal from the Search Engine listings altogether. In the long term, the bad guys are caught and ethical search engine marketing is the way to high quality traffic.

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