Seattle has become one of the capitols of the Internet boom. Folks down in Silicon Valley will dispute this, of course. Let them.

It doesn’t really matter where the capitol of the Internet is, as long as the ‘net continues to bring the world together in a peaceful, and hopefully profitable way.

Ethics has always been an important part of the landscape here on the shores of Puget Sound. Seattle residents will fall over themselves to do the right thing. Our business community is populated by some of the most dedicated capitalists on the planet; yet billion dollar industries will happily change direction if they are encroaching on an endangered salmon run.

Some may do a double take when we begin to consider ethics in relation to Search Engine Marketing. This is because marketing itself seems like an industry that is completely foreign to ethics. The purpose of marketing, to the layperson at least, is to generate buzz about a brand, whether that buzz is the result of a late-night TV ad campaign or a giant fiberglass hotdog on four wheels.

The Internet is not an intrinsically ethical place. In fact, it is an incredibly Darwinian place to do business- Darwinian in the sense that only the fittest will survive. Unlike business in the “real world”, being the fittest in search engine marketing does not always mean being able to spend the most money.

In traditional “real world” marketing, being able to spend a lot of money meant that you could buy a lot of exposure for your brand. Exposure is never a bad thing, but successful marketing on the Internet means being able to appeal to the Search Engine algorithms. This is done by creating Appealing websites with high quality content.

It is true that money can buy high quality, but high quality can also be purchased by putting your own time and effort into your website. More often, Internet marketing money is invested in black-hat SEO practices. The search engines are learning to recognize black-hat, and punishing the sites which practice the techniques, rendering the money spent on it a waste.

If your company has a big chunk of money that it is determined to spend on a Search Engine Marketing Campaign, but you wish to avoid the ethical stigma of nefarious methods, where can you spend it? The answer is Pay Per Click, or PPC advertising.

Some sources consider PPC to be nearly as ethically shaky as black-hat techniques in organic search. This attitude is rather short sighted. It supposes that success in organic search results is morally better than sponsored results. It also ignores the fact that sponsored results are what pay for the service that a search engine provides.

Sponsored results are the commercials of search engines. On Network TV, commercials were seen as a necessary evil- the commercial sponsors paid for the content. On the Search Engine Results page, the sponsored results are usually segregated from the organic results, but they are no fancier than the organic results. In fact, even though they are often prominently displayed at the top of the page, many search users simply ignore the sponsored results. This is the Internet equivalent of the taking a bathroom break during the commercials.

A dirty little secret of Search Engine Marketing is that PPC and Sponsored results ranking rely on more than how much the marketer pays. The size of the fee paid to the search engine is a factor that goes into the algorithm, but it is not the only factor. Very often, a local Seattle Search Engine Marketing campaign can out rank a high cost national campaign.

Call or click today to arrange a free 30 minute consultation with Search Engine Marketing Expert Chad Morgan and discuss how to create an effective and ethical campaign.