The Ethical Approaches to Internet Marketing
It is hard to believe that the internet marketing industry was once an unregulated and unmonitored crime scene of black-hat techniques, search engine manipulation and general unethical chaos! Google has now implemented an abundance of algorithms in order to weed out the bad eggs and ensure that the good guys manage to reach the all-important top-spot in the SERPs, but it wasn’t always this way. Thankfully, with modern online marketing, the best way to achieve success is by sticking to the ethical methods.
Original Content
The algorithms are far too advanced to dupe with existing content that you stole from another website and reworded in order to appear ‘original’, and this practice is actually known as plagiarism. In order to be truly ethical, it is important that internet marketing copywriters craft completely original, relevant and readable content that is written with both the user and the search engine in mind.
Valuable Backlinks
Building backlinks with other businesses that offer a similar service to yours can be a great way to encourage the search engine to see your site as a trustworthy and valuable source of information. With this said, every website that you create a backlink with essentially ‘vouches’ for the quality of your site and its content, which means that yours will do the same for theirs. If the other website lacks quality and isn’t particularly ethical, then it may bring down the value of your own. In addition to this, creating numerous backlinks with low-quality sites for the sake of it is highly unethical and is often referred to as link-farming.
Slow and Steady Wins the Race
Unless you invest in PPC marketing like Google AdWords, there is no shortcut to success when it comes to long-term approaches like SEO, content marketing and email marketing. After all, these techniques focus on building up a rapport with the search engine in order to encourage organic results in the SERPs. Many experts neglect to mention that a key part of remaining ethical in internet marketing is understanding that the process can often be slow and that it involves resisting the temptation to use black-hat methods for a short-term gain.
From content marketing to SEO services, it is safe to say that there are many ways to build a relationship with the search engine and ensure that your website finds its way to the first page of the SERPs. Being ethical means avoiding the temptation to use of black-hat methods in order to do this quickly; although this may sound like a good idea, it isn’t well-received by the search engine and will often land you in hot water!