But desperation in SEO brings the same results as desperation in banking. If you invest too heavily, or construct elaborate schemes to inflate your income (I’m looking at you, US sub-prime mortgage sector), then ultimately the whole thing will blow up in your face and you’ll be worse off than when you started.

It’s the same with SEO. Try all the dodgy tricks you like to get up there on Google — in the end, Google’s going to get wise and you’ll suffer for it.

Ethical SEO

Practitioners of Ethical SEO recognise that the real purpose of search engine optimisation is to help people find content that’s relevant to their needs. So while a black hat SEO consultant asks, “how can I get to number one as fast as possible?”, an ethical SEO consultant asks “how can I help people find what they’re looking for as easily as possible?”.

The difference here is one of focus. Search engines are tools that help people find what they’re looking for: ethical SEO recognises this and works with the search engines to achieve that goal — it aims for an honest relationship with users. Black hat SEO ignores the needs of the users and tries to get the search engine to list a website highly in a particular set of search results whether or not the content of the website is relevant to that search.

What not to do

Unethical SEO will typically rely on techniques that attempt to ‘trick’ a search engine: hidden text, blocks of hidden links, duplicate domains — the key being that none of these adds quality content or makes it easy for people to find what they’re looking for because they’re methods that target search engines, not users.

The irony is, most websites that rely on unethical techniques would actually do just as well if they took the ethical approach. If you’re selling shoes, don’t cram your homepage with hidden links titled ‘shoes’ — just add more relevant content and make it easy to find!

End of the line

All of this ties nicely into the area of findability, which is really what we should be aiming for when we optimise our websites for search engines. They key, I think, is to look past the search engines and focus on user at the other end of the broadband line; then people will find your website and keep coming back.