Search Engine Optimization for Professionals

In relevant forums and newsletters all across the Internet, you can find profuse information detailing the activities of companies using shady techniques to spam search engines. In that sense, one cannot possibly stress enough that it’s crucial to hire SEO consultants and search engine marketers who are ethical. Granted, that’s a relevant discussion; but we should keep focus on the underlying motivations of SEO professionals. This is true in every industry, not just SEO. If the people in our industry can remember this when trying to create a UK SEM Company (and there are many factions trying to do this), it will go a lot smoother.

So what about when a potential client comes to you saying "we know exactly what we need" because they read somewhere how SEO should be done. What do you do when such customer requests a proposal for getting 10 entry sites linking their domain. All the while, they stubbornly refuse your suggestions to improve the actual website; all they want is to develop a network of fringe websites to improve their rankings.

This is a deceptive strategy because it tricks search engines into cataloguing hollow domains, just because the package is bound via sitemap to a link in the actual homepage of the customer’s website. Since those pages are hollow, they serve as nothing but a ploy to lure in search engines; in the user’s perspective, it serves no actual purpose other than wasting their time by forcing them to click through to get to the actual website they’re looking for. If something like this happened to you, how would you handle the customer: let him know such kind of strategy isn’t a good option, or just passively provide the requested service? It’s not that providing the requested service would necessarily be disreputable. But what if you see that their current site already has tons of great content pages? The real solution wouldn’t be the creation of doorway pages, but something substantially simpler and more effective: the adjustment of the content within their website to match what people searched for.

Whenever dealing with this kind of customers, I always try to persuade them how wrong, pointless and ineffective their chosen strategy would be. Should I fail in doing so, I won’t hesitate to turn down the client. Naturally, it would be annoying to let the easy money that would come from such a job go to waste. On top of everything, it would be more than simple to just provide the client with his exact request...AND the client would likely be happy he’d get what he asked for? Innumerable arguments you could raise, while convincing yourself there would be nothing wrong with taking such a job. But the bottom line is that it's your job as a professional SEO to do what you know in your heart is right. Being an SEO professional requires that you learn how to tell which buyers aren’t suited for you.

There will be other jobs and there will be other clients that appreciate your looking out for their site's long-term well-being. The small fee you’d lose from turning down a customer who didn’t value your professional opinion will look insignificant, once you realize the value of your professional integrity. Believe me!