Making the Correct Decisions as a SEO Professional

There’s nothing wrong with optimizing sites for higher rankings in the search engines; however according to information circulating the Internet, certain companies manage to spam the search engines using unethical strategies. On the other hand, there’s also much information concerning the vitality of hiring SEO strategists who are ethical. Granted, that’s a relevant discussion; but we should keep focus on the underlying motivations of SEO professionals. Its true in every industry, not just SEO. If the people in our industry can remember this when trying to create a Cheshire SEO Company (and there are many factions trying to do this), it will go a lot smoother.

How should we handle clients who suppose they know what’s best for them, after reading about sleazy SEO tricks and shortcuts on the Internet. What would you do if one such misinformed customer asked for something like a set of 10 entry domains liking their website. However, they’ll only be interested in getting some pages to provide their website fringe support, so they keep you from touching the site itself.

You know… the type of pages that will get retrieved by the search engines only, from a sitemap linked down low on the main home page. Since the pages are meant to serve as search engine bait, they provide the user with nothing but a distraction, since he’s required to make additional clicks to get to the real website they’d been looking for. Should you get faced with such a customer, what would you prefer: compromising your views of proper search engine optimization, or just give the customer what he thinks is better? Certainly, the creation of such pages in that way wouldn’t exactly be a violation of ethics. What if the actual website the customer is trying to promote actually featured tons of pages with great content? Once it gets down to it, the creation of those doorway pages would be nothing but a waste time; what the customer really needs is something much simpler: the optimization of the current content with appropriate search keywords.

If I found myself in such a situation where the customer stubbornly refused to listen to reason, I’d have to ask him to find another consultant that won’t be opposed to assist him in a search engine goose chase. Obviously it’s not pleasant to turn down such easy money. After all, that kind of task could be achieved using a Page Generator...the client would likely be happy he’d get what he wanted? It wouldn’t take a stretch of imagination to figure out several ways you could convince yourself it would be okay to take that easy money. It goes without argument that unless you don’t keep your focus on making an effective search engine optimization, you won’t be much of an SEO professional. That particular assignment would be expendable; you professional integrity would not.

If you keep perspective on your career, you’ll notice that losing this kind of customers is actually irrelevant. When you have to turn down intransigent customers who don’t value your expertise, you should think of that as an investment in your future. It worked for me!