Let’s begin by defining some terms and referencing established rulebooks and guidelines.  First, SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization, sometimes referred to as Organic Search Marketing.  Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing traffic to your website by improving “natural” search results in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s) of a given search engine.  There are three categories of SEO techniques used within the search marketing industry.  “White Hat” techniques are perfectly acceptable and follow all the rules – these SEO techniques can withstand the harshest criticism and hold up because there is nothing “unethical” about them.  At the other end of the spectrum are “Black Hat” techniques.  These techniques violate webmaster guidelines and risk detection, leading to penalties, by search engines that are constantly evolving their algorithms.  Finally, there are the “Gray Hat” techniques that are a little bit harder to categorize.  These are the techniques that are not obviously acceptable or unacceptable.  The rule of thumb for assessing these techniques generally involves asking the question, “Would my competitors report me for this?” and, if so, “Would a human reviewer working for the search engines determine that the technique is unacceptable?”  If you are genuinely trying to improve the user experience and not game the system, then you will be able to determine the shade of gray your techniques occupy.

The official search engine guidelines can be referenced here:
Google Webmaster Guidelines
Bing Webmaster Center
Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines

Here are some SEO tips to keep in mind:

DO: Research

Stay informed about SEO marketing trends by subscribing to industry newsfeeds and learning from others with relevant experience.  It is also important to research your target keywords, understand the competition, set goals for yourself and develop a plan for success.

DO: Copywriting

Write content that is relevant to your audience and that your visitors will actually read.  Provide RSS feeds for your articles so that your audience can subscribe to your website and get notified when new content is published.  Consistently add new content to your website so that visitors get in the habit of reading your articles.

DO: Site Optimization

Ensure that your website is technically sound and that there are no barriers preventing the search engines from accessing your content.  There are plenty of useful beginner guides to SEO that can help get you started in the right direction.  If you focus on optimizing the user experience and apply best SEO practices, then your website’s ranking will naturally improve in the search engines.

DO: Get Noticed

Be involved in your web community.  Visit other websites that your visitors are going to so that you can participate in the conversation.  Join social networking sites that your audience regularly visits and provide useful advice to questions they may post.  If you focus on providing an interactive experience, you will start to get natural links from other websites.  You may also utilize paid search engine marketing or purchase advertising space in influential websites to market your site further.

DO: Be Honest

Honesty pays.  Nowadays, people are power-surfing the web, quickly scanning pages and making split second decisions based on trust.  If your website is only optimized for search engines and does not provide meaningful content, then your customers will know right away and instantly hit the “Back” button.  If you build your website with honest intentions and focus on the user experience then the search engines will reward you for your effort.

DON’T: Cloak

Cloaking is when you serve one version of your website to the search engines and another to your visitors.  This is an old technique that can be detected automatically and will result in the removal of cloaked pages from the index. 

DON’T: Hide Text

Hiding text is not the same as cloaking but is often confused with it.  Hiding text is when you use technical tricks to make your content disappear from the page when a visitor accesses it.  Some tricks include having white text or slightly off-white text on a page with a white background, using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to hide content (“display: none;”), or using JavaScript to hide text.  Again, this is very easy to detect and will result in negative consequences from the search engines.

DON’T: Participate in Link Farms

It is a much better use of your time and energy to build a quality website and market it properly than it is to chase very poor quality links.  The biggest risk here is that the search engines punish the link farm and then apply penalties against the websites that participated in it.

DON’T: Spam

Spamming can take on many different forms including bulk emails, automated form submissions, and automated discussion board posts.  These types of practices annoy people and ruin any good will and trust that you may have already established.  Moreover, their effectiveness is generally poor.

DON’T: Lie

If a technique is blatantly distrustful then it is only a matter of time before the search engines catch on.  The last thing you want is to get called out in a public forum for dishonest tactics.  This can lead to public relations nightmares and a overall tainting of your brand.

Conclusion

Most of the issues surrounding Ethical SEO can be clarified by properly doing your research and ensuring that any SEO marketing company you choose to work with is credible.  If the SEO consultant is guaranteeing results or over-promising success then that is a good indication that you may need to look elsewhere for help.

Have you ever wondered if you are doing enough updates to your website, or what those updates should be?  Before you look at making changes to your site it is really essential to understand what your goals are and how they are converting.  A conversion happens when a visitor to your website performs an intended action.  Your conversion rate is the ratio of the number of visitors to your website that complete the desired action compared to the total number of visitors to your website.  It is important that you define your conversions so that they are consistent with your broader business objectives.  For example, your business goals might involve maximizing your profits, increasing sales, generating leads, and improving customer communication.  Therefore you may measure a conversion as a customer purchasing something from your website, completing your contact form, subscribing to your newsletter or registering to become a member of your website.  In order to optimize your website to improve conversions you need a tool that can measure how changes to your website affect the way visitors convert on your desired actions.  Google Website Optimizer is a free tool that allows you to setup tests to confirm that changes you make to your website are having a positive impact.

Google Website Optimizer empowers you to set up controlled tests to measure how changes to your website affect your conversion rate.  By leveraging advanced analytics methods you will have the confidence to know that your website is evolving in a beneficial way.  Google Website Optimizer allows you to segment traffic to your website so different visitors see different versions of pages and once the test is finished you will know the best version to use.  Furthermore, you can run multiple tests at the same time on multiple goals so that you can quickly improve conversion rates and increase visitor satisfaction.

Testing with Google Website Optimizer

There are many different tests that you can perform ranging from basic (fonts, headlines, images, copy text, form, etc.) to more complex (multi-page forms like shopping carts, registrations, etc.).  A/B Tests allow you to serve half of your visitors one version of a page and the other half a different page.  Multivariate testing allows you to change many variables at once on the same page.  Say, for example, you want to test three different headlines for your page – the first in black, the second in red and the third in green.  You also have three different images you want to test and three different “add to cart” buttons.  Since the tool supports “full factorial” multivariate testing, you are actually testing twenty seven (3 x 3 x 3 = 27) different versions of the same page at the same time.  If you are concerned that you do not want all of your visitors participating in the tests, you can throttle your share of voice so that only some of your visitors participate.

According to Dictionary.com the definition of optimization is “the fact of optimizing; making the best of anything.”  Therefore, by participating in the continual process of optimizing your website and measuring the results you will benefit by making your website the best it can possibly be.  You will see an improvement in your conversion rates and an overall improvement in your user experience.

Here are some helpful links to help you get started on your path to having the best website possible:

Google Website Optimization

GWO Video Introduction

GWO Tricks