Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Code of Conduct

Remember a time when SEO was little more than optimising your Meta tags and including keywords in your content? Back then online marketing was not very competitive and there where very few SEO companies. But now much of the industry is cutthroat and just about everyone with a website is a Search Engine Optimiser. Unfortunately, due to the now highly competitive nature of online marketing, many SEO companies, individual Search Engine Optimisers or website owners are turning to unethical tactics to get ahead of the game. It is the Search Engine Optimisers duty to represent a client honestly and reliably in any SEO campaign. Unethical SEO methods may bring in short term results but ultimately it will harm a website’s rankings, possibly leading to a removal of a website from a search engine’s index. Anyone with a website is strongly advised to read Google’s Advice for Webmasters before employing an SEO company who claim to use ethical practices. These guidelines, however, don’t form the basis of an SEO code of conduct so we’ve written our own:

• Using cloaking tactics are a sure way to get your site penalised by search engines. Cloaking is basically implementing methods to show search engines a different version of a page than that shown to your visitors. Search engines can now easily detect cloaking so it wouldn’t be worth it.
• Dubious redirects aren’t liked by both search engines and directories alike. This will most likely cause your website directory listings to be deleted.
• Don’t create “doorway” pages just for fooling search engines. This is also seen a cloaking and search engines will detect this and penalise your website.
• Creating multiple domains, subdomains or pages with duplicate content will almost definitely result in a duplication penalty for your website in Google. When you have a duplicate content penalty, Google will de-index your website’s pages. However, having the same content on www.example.com and www.example.co.za and other top level domains shouldn’t be a problem according to Google’s Matt Cutts.
• Do provide unique and quality content through out your website. There are too many “junk sites” (such as affiliate programs) websites out there with no original content. So if you are part of an affiliate program, then give your visitors a reason to come back, give them quality content.
• Don’t add pages to a website that contain spyware.

SEO is not only just about your clients’ websites but also about the clients themselves. Here is our code of conduct regarding clients:

• Don’t take on competing clients. This can lead to a potential conflict of interest for you. Competing clients are likely targeting the same keywords, and an ethical SEO would not put one client’s interest over the others for any reason.
• Do put your client’s interest above your own. Don’t sneak your or other client’s links into a client’s website.
• Don’t take risks with a client’s website. Don’t use unethical (refer to list above) tactics to give a client short term gains, as the website will be penalised by search engines.
• Do be considerate and cooperate with a client even after they no longer use your services e.g. had over passwords and other information pertaining to their website.
• Don't use any easy options to get backlinks for your client. Never use automated software to spam blogs, forums, and guestbooks. This will cause distress to people who are potential customers of your client and damage their reputation. Instead take a few minutes to contribute and you’ll likely get a better, quality backlink for your client.

How to embed HTML into your Blog

Can't embed HTML tags in a blog? Ever tried to show a piece of HTML code in your blog but it won’t appear when published? Follow this step-by-step guide on how to write HTML code in a blog: For an example let’s use the HTML tag <title>. You can also use larger pieces of HTML. Open Macromedia Dreamweaver or any other similar website development software. I show you how to do this in Dreamweaver:

• Create a new basic HTML page.
• Click on the “Design” tab.

• Type in or paste the HTML your want to appear as text (<title>).
• Click on the “Code” tab. The tag will now appear as: &lt;title&gt;
• Create a new blog post (in this case we use www.blogger.com/).
• Edit the post in the “Edit HTML” window.
• Copy the code shown in Dreamweaver’s “Code” tab and paste it into the blog window.

Now you can publish your blog post and your readers will be able to view your code example.

Using RSS Feeds for content syndication

One of the great ways to improve your website’s visibility is to publish and syndicate your optimised content. This is done using a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed. Lockergnome, an online newsletter, reportedly have a preference of 5:1 for RSS subscription rather than e-mail subscriptions. And their not the only ones. Many of the leading online newspapers are showing increases in their RSS Feed subscriptions. And as you will know, increased subscriptions leads to increased visibility & traffic, which will result in increased profits. With an RSS Feed, the content publisher places a feed link on their site which a user can register with aggregator software on their own computer. The aggregator software can be set to retrieve new content periodically. The advantages of RSS Feeds are that the user will be notified on new content instead of manually checking for it, and they can be automatically downloaded. It can be really simple to set up your own RSS Feed, especially if you already know HTML. Let us create an RSS Feed file step by step:

1. Your fist line needs to be an XML declaration.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
2. Next you need to open the RSS tag and channel tag. Your feed content will go between these tags, and above the closing RSS and channel tags.
<rss version="2.0"> <channel>
3. Now you can put in all the information about your RSS Feed. The LastBuildDate tag will be the date/time the feed was last updated.
<title>The title of RSS Feed</title> <link>http://www.domain.com/</link> <description>Description of RSS Feed</description> <lastBuildDate>Web, 06 Sep 2006 12:01:00 GMT</lastBuildDate> <language>en-us</language>
4. After the RSS Feed information you need to list each RSS item. The example here is for one item. If you have more than one, put each item underneath the “<!-- more items below here -->” tag.
<item> <title>Item title</title> <link>http://domain.com/item/item01</link> <guid>http://domain.com/item/item01</guid> <pubDate> Web, 06 Sep 2006 10:01:00 GMT</pubDate> <description>[CDATA[ Description of item. ]]</description> </item> <!-- more items below here -->
5. To finish off you just need to close off the RSS tag and channel tag.
</channel> </rss>
6. Once this file is uploaded you can use Feed Validator to double check it.

For more information of RSS Feeds, join our SEO forum for advice.