Each time a company undertakes a search engine optimization program, whether it's performed in-house or outsourced to an SEO service, the majority of the attention (and rightly so) is centered on the company website. This is the one aspect where there is a sense of control--once a website is released into the wild, the organization will have to see how its site fares against all the other websites on the market, whether another sites are employing ethical SEO tactics or not.



Besides changes made to the organization website, the assumption is frequently that the company and, if it is using one, its SEO service, has zero control over what appears browsing engine results. However, this is simply not usually the case. Often, you or your SEO service might have a direct influence on search engine results by monitoring your competitors and reporting them to the major seo ranking search engines once the SEO techniques applied to their site fall outside what is popularly called ethical SEO. (Please note that while I genuinely believe that the term "ethical" is tossed around too often, "ethical SEO" is just about the standard phrase to describe white hat techniques, and therefore it is the phrase I take advantage of through the entire article.)



To start with, let's define competitors. Virtually every company has at the very least a number of others so it considers to be primary competitors--the ones that sell the same products and services, that are of similar size, and so on. It is important that the SEO efforts (or lack thereof) of these competitors, whether they are using ethical SEO techniques or not, be monitored on a routine basis. If they have not hired an SEO service of their very own, or if they have not started doing SEO in-house at all, you may have satisfaction knowing that the use of this channel, for the moment, is yours. If your competitors begin an SEO campaign, with or lacking any outside SEO service, you can learn much about their sales and marketing tactics by evaluating the keyphrases which they target. And you may also investigate whether they're using ethical SEO practices inside their campaign.







It's very important to remember it is unlikely that searchers are going to decide only between you and the principal competitors you've listed. They are likely to consider any company that matches their particular needs and that shows up for his or her search term. For this reason your criteria for a competitor online should broaden to encompass any company that provides products or services like yours that outranks you for many targeted keyphrases. If your in-house staff or your SEO service not only continually monitors your se positions but additionally analyzes the businesses that appear above you browsing results, you can often identify forward-looking competitors that you're previously unaware--your primary competitors of tomorrow.



This brings us to the important thing dilemma of ethical SEO. Search engine optimization remains an extremely new concept to the majority of companies. Even probably the most respected companies may make mistakes in this arena, either by choosing the wrong SEO service, or by trying in order to avoid hiring an SEO service altogether by bringing it in home with well-intentioned but unqualified people. As an example, BMW's German site was recently removed temporarily from the Google index for using doorway pages--something that is not considered a moral SEO practice. It stands to seo ranking
reason that your competitors are also not immune to violations. There are very notable examples of otherwise smart and established companies hiring an SEO service that put them in a worse situation than before they pursued SEO--by getting their site taken off major search engines for violating the engine's terms of service, for example. Soon ago, there clearly was a well-publicized example where all the clients of a Las Vegas SEO service were penalized. Almost all of the clients claimed that they were not informed that the firm was not practicing ethical SEO and that they certainly were therefore at risk.