President Obama And The Era Of Responsibility

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

President Barack Obama has been sworn in and the era of responsibility has begun. Does that include responsible search engine optimization? We hope so.

While Obama may not himself be overly concerned with SEO, I think that he appreciates the power of the Internet as a whole. After all, he used it successfully to reach a part of his support base in both the general election and for his bid as Democratic nominee. This clearly was the year for political Internet marketing and that includes search engine optimization.

His insistence that we have entered into an era of responsibility does beg the question, what about SEO? So I’ll ask: What about responsible SEM? What is that exactly?

Responsible SEO is first and foremost an ethical and honest optimization. Do you represent your company honestly in the search engines? In other words, if a searcher finds your web pages through a search, will your title and description accurately reflect what they will find when click the link and land on your page?

Secondly, responsible optimization means not doing anything that is deemed unfair in terms of competition and search engine marketing. Do you play fairly with the search engines? Do you engage in “blackhat” or unapproved search engine marketing activities? If so then you are not practicing responsible optimization.

Search engine optimizers need to concern themselves with reaching their target markets with honesty and by focusing no best practices, not through spam and unauthorized search engine marketing practices. We encourage you to focus your SEM efforts on these principles as we dedicate ourselves to in this new era of responsibility.