Google's Matt Cutts said in a recent Webmaster Help video that SEO campaigns are not spam when developed properly.

Google’s principal engineer Matt Cutts said in a video for the company’s Webmaster Help channel that the concept of SEO as spam is wrong.

Cutts, responding to a user question, said that white hat SEO tactics are an ideal way to ensure a search engine can locate, index and highlight quality content designed to suit users. Carefully planned and highly editorial content marketing can help businesses gain search visibility.

He acknowledges that some people used black hat SEO to try to heir search rankings. However, corrupt tactics, such as keyword stuffing and hacking, have been identified by Google’s search team and will result in poor search rankings.

To bring the most SEO benefits to a website, Cutts advised marketers to consider every element of their sites. URLs should be clear and easily read by search crawlers. Websites should load quickly and without any broken links or missing elements. Ultimately, content is the most important part of any website. Articles, whether news or landing pages, should be written for both the prospect browsing the website and search crawlers.

“There’s plenty, an enormous amount, of white hat, great quality stuff that you can do as a search engine optimizer,” Cutts said. “You can do things like making sure your pages are crawlable and accessible so that people can find them just by clicking on links.”

Keyword strategy is also an element of an SEO campaign that can struggle if not properly implemented. According to Cutts, prospects are unlikely to use industry jargon in their searches for most industries. So strategies should be developed around more common speech than highly technical language.

As Google continues to update its algorithm to focus on quality content, SEO campaigns will become scrutinized even further. The most recent update to Google’s Panda algorithm came at the end of September, and negatively impacted several websites with a substantial amount of low-quality content, Brafton reported.

Joe Meloni is Brafton's former Executive News and Content Writer. He studied journalism at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has written for a number of print and web-based publications.