Ethical Internet Marketing

We appreciate how much time, effort and money goes into building your brand. We also know a thing or two about the internet. There are other companies that claim the same and we would not be surprised if you find yourself doing business with them at some point.

If you do, ask them for their policies on ethical internet marketing. If they don't have any, ask yourself if you should place your brand in their hands.

Our own policies are:

• We do not use, endorse or in any way deal with unsolicited emails - spam. In fact, we reserve the right to turn down work or retract our services if we find our involvement would compromise our policy on spam. This policy applies in all cases, even if carried out for a company based in a nation which does not have anti-spam legislation in place.

• We never send emails out of the blue to prospective customers of our SEO services. We advertise our SEO services via online ads and advertising in online and offline publications. If a company emails you and says something along the lines of 'I visited your site and noticed it wasn't listed in...' then be sure to vet them properly. Technically they have sent you spam.

• We do not guarantee a #1 ranking on any search engine. We can guarantee a #1 listing on pay-per-click ads, but in many cases we may advise against this - it could cost you far more than it is worth. If a company guarantees a #1 ranking, ask them to put it in writing. If they actually deliver this, you'll find the 'guarantee' so full of exceptions and clauses it is as good as useless.

• We are as open as we can possibly be about our methods. Every company has a need for some degree of privacy and we are no different. But we like to think we are up-front about all the important matters, such as where your money is being spent. If you have any concerns, simply ask us.

• We do not use doorway pages or "throwaway" domains. Any web sites that we create for you belong to you and are entirely separate from your corporate site and, indeed, each other.

• We will never ask you to link back to our site. We would appreciate the link, but there is a key difference between us being happy with a link and insisting on receiving a link. If a company doing work for you asks you to include a link back to their site, feel free to turn them down.

• We do not use "free-for-all" links. They are a waste of time - for you and for us.

• We do not submit your site to tens of thousands of search engines you have never heard of. We concentrate on the key search engines - thousands of additional search engines are meaningless and can actually harm your site's showing on those that really matter.

• We endeavor to meet all requirements of all the search engines utilised in our SEO and search engine marketing services. Or to put it another way, we do not use automated methods to submit to search engines. Some companies may say this is being needlessly overcautious. We say you can never be too cautious - if a search engine classes a certain action as wrong, we want a real human being in place to deal with this. Automated submissions cannot do this and could have an adverse effect on your site's search engine showing.

Please contact us if you have any questions which have not been answered here. We also encourage ethical internet marking organisations to contact us to help develop our policies and ensure we are doing everything we can for our clients and ourselves.