The article talks about the evolvement of search engine marketing. It also throws light on how ethical SEO services can yield beneficial results for the small businesses.
Statistics reveal that Google records 34,000 searches per second, Yahoo gets 3,200 search queries per second and Bing gets 927 search queries per second which equals to a whooping number of 98.8 billion searches per month witnessed by the search engines. The statistics itself reveals the dependency of the global citizens on the search engines. As a result of such overwhelming dependency on the World Wide Web, the businesses have also become keen to carve a distinct identity in the online arena. Thus, more than 98% of world’s businesses, big or small, have fully functional websites which showcases the services they offer or the products they sell. However, with competition creeping up fast, a mere website will not do any justice to these businesses; rather, a distinct online visibility is the need of the hour. To meet this crucial need, the businesses started marketing their brands and products in the web world and began integrating several promotional techniques to reach out to their targeted network of potential clients. The concept of internet marketing thus came into being. Internet marketing is a broad term, from which a variety of related concepts branch out and one of the most important aspects is search engine marketing. Search Engine Marketing is abbreviated as SEM and involves specialized set of techniques which are used to improve the visibility of a website in the search engine result pages or SERPs. Search engine marketing services use paid placements and paid inclusion as well as Search engine optimization services to help a website achieve higher ranking in search results pages.
Search engine marketing services include both organic search results or SEO and paid search results (Adwords). With further development in the field of Internet, the social networking websites have evolved ‘viral’ popularity and thus, the search engine marketing experts have spent no thought to make social media marketing as a part of Search engine marketing services.
Compared to other search engine marketing techniques such as PPC campaigns and social media optimization service, the small and mid-sized companies have been quite keen to integrate SEO services into their business policies. There are many Internet Marketing companies that offer comprehensive SEO services and the business houses are left spoilt for choices while looking to hire one. However, these businesses should remember that the SEO processes are time-consuming and therefore should stay away from SEO service providers that vows to produce instant results, within a week’s time. There are some set of techniques that are forbidden in SEO and the business houses should stay away from the service providers who tread on these unethical lines to promote websites. So, the question is what are the forbidden SEO services which need to be avoided?
Some of the common unethical SEO services practiced by scam internet marketing companies are –
•Usage of hidden texts and hidden links on pages to lure the search engine spiders.
•Duplicated Content with Targeted Keyword Stuffed within
•Usage sneaky re-directs and cloaking
•Owning shadow domains
•Creating doorway pages for the search engines
To be frank, there are no secret tunnels in SEO services which can improve the organic rankings. So, while hiring a SEO company, the businesses must assess the reputation of the firm and if possible, talk with some of their clients. Ethical or White hat SEO services do not show instant improvements in search engine rankings, but will surely benefit the site in long run.
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