Esther C Kane

Ethical SEO Services should be abundant (in a perfect world) but alas, that is not the case.

I know that today’s economy is taking a toll on traditional SEO firms because I’m seeing press releases highlighting sales, new fee structures and new services. So, I can only guess that companies are beginning to feel the pinch.

One of these companies (and I won’t mention who but I’m sure you can find them if you type in “seo by the hour”) – anyway, one of these companies is offering a new service of SEO by the hour.

Is this providing ethical seo services? I’ll let you decide.

This seems to be how it works…

1) You pay $150.00 per hour
2) You choose from a list of services what you want done on your website.
3) These services include…

* Keyword Research
* Meta Elements: Titles, Descriptions & Keywords
* On-site Links
* Off-site Links – Community Links, Paid Reviews, Competitive
Linkbuilding
* Content Creation
* Content Editing
* Content Optimization for Search Engines
* Content Creation & Distribution for Backlinks
* Publicity Writing: Press Releases, Articles & Blogs
* social networking – Managing Profiles, Content & Friends
* Creating an XML Sitemap to Submit Directly to Search Engines
* Creation of New Targeted Landing Pages
* Competitive Analysis, General or Link building
* Consulting To Explore New online marketing Ventures

So, each one of these services is separate. You’re basically buy a la carte. Sounds great, right? I mean you can just pay them whatever your budget allows and whatever your budget allows will determine the amount of work your website gets done to it.

The question if these are ethical seo services is in what they don’t tell you.

What they aren’t telling you in this new “system” is that SEO is very integrated. One piece of the puzzle relies very much on the other piece of the puzzle. I mean, what if you purchased “Meta Elements: Titles, Descriptions and Keywords” but you didn’t purchase “Keyword Research”. What’s the point of optimizing the meta tags if you don’t know what phrases to optimize for? That’s like purchasing drywall without purchasing the framework to hang the drywall on.

Sure, some of these features could be a la carte, social networking, publicity writing to name two but many of these features rely on other features in order to work.

It’s misleading to give the customer the impression that he can purchase what he wants and the site will work just fine. Now, I don’t know, maybe in the phone conversation with this company they tell you this, maybe they try to get you to buy the whole package, I don’t know but the article they wrote does not explain that. The article refers to the fact that they can work with you so that you don’t have to spend as much as you may with other SEO firms.

Now, I’ve been doing SEO for 8 years now and I work with my clients and their budget. My services are somewhat a la carte but there are some services that I don’t sell without others, I mean I would never claim to be able to optimize meta tags or web content without the keyword research.

So, is it ethical seo services? Could be, it’ll depend on the information they give you when you contact them!