SEO Ethics

Our SEO Best Practice Guidelines

1. Ethical SEO Techniques. Search Engine Marketing is not a black art. Clever tricks and manipulation of the search engines may produce short-term rankings, but they put your company's domain and both our reputations at stake. Our belief is that sound optimization techniques along with solid content and search-engine friendly site construction are a clear path to long-term search engine success. We've never had a client banned or penalized in any way by the search engines for unfair SEO tactics and we do not intend to start with your website. Be assured that SEO Gateway does not use cloaking, redirects or other unethical tactics that show one page to a visitor and another to the search engines. These techniques violate the terms of service of the major search engines. Sites in violation may face penalties or have their domain banned.
   
   
2. Pay Per Click Campaigns. We are not a Pay Per Click middleman. We do make recommendations to our clients about additional traffic that may be gained by paid placement or pay per click listings. And we do consider paid search advertising a great compliment to any organic search marketing campaign. Targeted PPC listings can be a great buy. They can fill in gaps, boost a campaign for a special promotion and even target local markets for more general keywords. However, we believe that PPC campaigns are only effective if you can measure the ROI of the campaign. We help our clients deploy ROI tracking and manage the campaign to maximize targeted leads and conversions. Like any marketing opportunity, we believe you should test a campaign on a limited scale, fine tune and evaluate its potential. PPC or any advertising is not worth doing if it does not produce measurable ROI.
   
   
3. Manual Submissions. SEO Gateway uses a manual submission process. We never use automated submission tools to promote websites. The use of automated submission tools generally will result in nothing but an inbox full of spam. Instead of submitting your site to thousands of search engines, most automated tools submit your site to Free For All link pages and the like. The major search engines receive 90% of the traffic. These engines have been blocking automated submissions for years. Leading engines like Google, combat submission spam by simply ignoring submissions. Instead Google will only index sites that it finds linked to other sites in its database. Here's a secret! For most of the major engines submissions are not necessary and not even helpful. All you need to do is build a quality web site and gets links to your site other from quality, relevant web sites that are already indexed. Oversubmitting and autosubmitting will only hurt your chances of being indexed. If the search engines are missing some of your pages chances are that you have site structure issues that need to be addressed.
   
   
4. Just Say 'No' to Doorway Pages. SEO Gateway does not create meaningless content pages solely designed for search engine rankings. These may be described as doorway pages or gateway pages. This type of promotion usually includes creating hundreds of almost identical pages on your server. Each page may substitute out a small amount of content for different target keywords. Typically these pages are placed on your server and are accessible only through hidden links. They are such poor quality that you would not want them to be a visible part of your web site. Some companies combine the use of doorway pages with other unethical tactics like cloaking and redirects. All the major search engines consider this tactic spam.
   
   
5. Relevant Content. In contrast to doorway pages, we believe that long-term success in the search engines begins with solid content. Keyword research reveals what phrases are being actively searched for. It is to your benefit to provide content on your site that answers these queries. Websites with useful content to visitors will also find favor with the search engines. Sometimes this is a chicken before the egg type situation, but that's why search engine optimization should be considered a long-term strategy. For quick results, we urge our clients to consider pay per click keyword advertising.
   
   
6. Quality Link Building Strategies. We do not participate in link farms. SEO Gateway advises our clients on the importance of having high-quality, topically relevant links pointed to their site. Our professional staff can design a link building campaign for your site. We provide competitive research to identify link popularity of your competition and we provide recommendations for paid portal and directory listings to boost link popularity. We can provide a linking strategy for your company or run a link building campaign. Keep in mind that it's important that all links to your site reiterate the theme and keywords you are targeting and that you do not link to poor-quality or sites using questionable SEO tactics. Search engines sometimes will blacklist sites just by association.
   
   
7. Fair Pricing. We believe in earning a dollar for honest work. Perhaps that's our midwest values showing, but we bill our clients based on the labor involved in optimizing their site and maintaining their rankings. All of the optimization we do happens on your web site and your domain. Once complete, you own the results of this labor. Beware of companies who build and optimize a "promotional site" for your company on a throw away domain. They then charge you for each click that you receive. If you decide to terminate the contract, they shut down the site (and your traffic). Or they simply change the logo on the site and promote one of your competitors.
   
   
8. Accountability. SEO Gateway provides our clients with regular reports showing your positions in the search engines. We also help our clients put in place tools to monitor their traffic and conversions. Our job does not end with just getting your site rankings. Those rankings need to translate into traffic which translates into sales. We want to be your long-term e-business partner. Your success is our success!