What it Means To Be a Search Engine Marketing Professional
By Jill Whalen of
Sending Email
HighRankings
Nyms not only combats spam, it is one more layer of protection against other email threats viruses, worms, spyware, adware, phishing scams, and more. Better than a spam filter, Nyms puts you in control of your incoming email because it uses disposable, alias addresses. When your Nyms email aliases are shared with spammers, you can simply disable that Nyms alias and stop the spam from flooding your real inbox. spam filter to pinpoint where unsolicited messages are coming from and kill spam at its source.
Reading Email
There's a lot of stuff posted on search engine forums and
newsletters around the world about how companies who spam the
search engines are unethical, and that it's important to hire only
"ethical SEO consultants" or "ethical search engine marketers."
There are some things that you can do to make your online experience a little bit easier. There are some ways to keep spam from ruining your day. Spam filters are one of those things. Spam filters are an extremely successful way of managing or stopping unwanted emails, but occasionally they can work too well. While they can act very vigorously to keep your inbox from receiving spam, they can also prevent you from getting many of your wanted emails as well.
Storing Email But, if you think about it, ethics is not something that's
quantifiable. What makes any given SEO technique ethical or
unethical? Isn't ethics more of a way of life than a method for
doing something? Is trying to trick the search engines really
unethical? Sure, it's stupid, in my opinion, but is it really
unethical? I don't believe that those who practice what I sometimes
refer to as "shady SEO techniques" can necessarily be classified as
unethical. Just as everyone who follows every search engine rule
can't automatically be assumed to be ethical.
mail that is both unsolicited by the recipient and sent in substantively identical form to many recipients. Thus, mail. Some definitions of spam specifically include the aspects of email that is unsolicited and sent in bulk. Spam filter is a program that is used to detect unsolicited and unwanted email and prevent those messages from getting to a user's inbox. Like other types of filtering programs, a spam filter looks for certain criteria on which it bases judgments.
Email Software What we should instead be discussing is which companies are
*professional* and which are just out for a buck. This is true in
every industry, not just SEO. If the people in our industry can
remember this when trying to create a professional organization of
SEOs (and there are many factions trying to do this), it will go a
lot smoother. It's really quite simple. My friend Alan Perkins, who
is a champion of "professional SEO," pointed out this page to me
recently. It says in part:
We fight Spam in several ways. First, our search engine list contains only quality search engines that we monitor for spamming. If a search engine is identified as a spammer, we quickly remove it from our submission list. We also protect your email address, with the option to mask your email address so you won't get spammed. Easy Resubmission
Antispam Software What defines a professional?
The new anti spam filters are easy to set up from the web based control panel Aplus.Net offers to its web hosting customers. The service is flexible allowing the user to select from several settings and to tune up the sensitivity of the filters. spam is not an exact science and that's why some legitimate mail may go to the spam folders if the filter is tuned to be very sensitive. That's why Aplus.Net gives the option to it's customers to review the spam folders, before erasing the spam.
Fight Spam "A professional is a person who, by education, training, and
experience, performs work, analyzes and solves problems, makes
decisions, and promotes ethics associated with a particular field
of study." - A. Carol Rusaw, Learning by Association, HRD
Quarterly, Summer 1995.
Stoping Spam They go on to list some criteria for defining a professional.
The one that really jumped out at me was this:
Block Spam "[The] Professional assumed to know what is good for the client
better than the client."
Spam Emails That really hits the nail on the head. It would be easy for any
of us to say, "Sure, why not, I'll take your money and just tweak
your Meta tags" when asked to do so by a client. Of course it would
be easy money. But would it be right if you knew that doing so
probably wouldn't really help their site be found in the search
engines? Not in my opinion; nor would it be professional.
Email Account So what about when a potential client comes to you saying "we
know exactly what we need" because they read somewhere how SEO
should be done. They ask you for a
proposal to create 10 zebra
(doorway) pages for their site. They don't want you to touch the
actual pages of their site, they just want pages that live on
the "fringes" of the site. You know, the kind that only the
search engines will find (because you added a link way down low
on the home page to a sitemap of all the zebra pages). Once the
user arrives at one of the pages from the search engines,
they're basically forced to click an extra time to finally
arrive at the *real* site that they wanted to begin with.
Sending Email Should you give the client a quote for this even though you know
in your
heart that it's not necessarily
the best way to optimize their site? Certainly, creating those
pages that way couldn't really be considered unethical or
anything. But what if you see that their current site already
has tons of great content pages? They really don't need to add
zebra pages, they just need to tweak their current content a bit
to make sure they're using words that real people use when
searching.
Reading Email Or perhaps they just need to make sure the search engines can
easily spider through the site and find all that great content,
e.g., turn dynamic URLs into static URLs.
Storing Email What do you do if when you explain this to the client, they're
still set on using those zebra pages? They refuse to make changes
to their actual pages (cuz someone told them they shouldn't have
to!), and even though the site will be much improved by making
these changes, no amount of cajoling will convince them of this. So
what do you do then? Do you do things the way they want you to? Do
they really know better than you, the SEO professional?
Email Software If I were in this situation, and I couldn't persuade them how
wrong, unnecessary and shortsighted their preferred technique was,
I'd have to turn down the job altogether. Yeah, it's hard to turn
down some decent money that a job like that could bring. I mean,
you could probably even create those zebra pages using WPG's Page
Generator, and give them some fancy new name. They're really not
zebra pages...these ones would be giraffe pages! It could be good
money for little work. And after all...it IS what the client wants,
right?
Antispam Software There are plenty of ways you can justify it to yourself. But the
bottom line is that it's your job as a professional to do what you
know in your heart is right. If it means you don't get that
particular job, then so be it. There will be other jobs. And there
will be other clients that appreciate your looking out for their
site's long-term well-being. You can bank on that. Seriously. The
money you lose from declining that type of work will be made up in
so many different ways. Trust me.
Fight Spam Contact Jill Whalen by e-mail at jill@highrankings.com, or by
phone at 508-309-3037
Stoping Spam
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Jill Whalen of High Rankings is an internationally recognized
search engine optimizationconsultant and editor of the free
weekly High Rankings Advisor
search engine marketing newsletter
Block Spam She specializes in search engine optimization, SEO consultations
and seminars. Jill's handbook,
"The Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines" teaches
business owners how and where to
place relevant keyword phrases on their Web sites so that they
make sense to users and gain high rankings in the major search
engines.
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