As any business owner knows, company accounts can be a complicated affair; you can rush through your book keeping and tax return and probably pay too much tax at the end of the year, or you could hire an accountant to look through your expenses and find legal and legitimate ways of reducing your tax bill to what it should be.
You can also get an accountant to look in to tax avoidance schemes to reduce your tax bill even further, but if you do this you’d better make sure everything is correct or the HMRC will be knocking on your door. At the far end of the spectrum you could act illegally, and put through expenses that don’t exist, lie on your tax return, and end up paying no tax what-so-ever. If you do this you could get away with it, but it is of course risky, very risky.
For tax purposes there is a sliding scale of what is allowed, with legal and low risk strategies at one end, to highly illegal and risky strategies at the other. They key is to find an accountant that can reduce your tax bill as much as possible but crucially stay within the law so that HMRC are happy.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the same; there is a sliding scale from ‘legal’ and low risk strategy at one end (white-hat SEO), to highly ‘illegal’ and risky strategies at the other (black-hat SEO). Of course it’s the search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo that determine what is ‘illegal’, i.e. breaks their guidelines.
Tax allowances change every year, and in a similar way search engines continually change their algorithms and determine what they deem as ‘legal’. If the government change a tax allowance, it is your responsibility to adjust your accounts accordingly, and if you don’t you can be in trouble. Of course the more your accountant manipulates your accounts to save you tax, the greater the chance of your tax return being incorrect, so the more vigilant you and your accountant need to be.
If you stick to pure white-hat SEO you will more than likely have a website that will always be ‘legal’, but may not give instant gratification like an 'illegal' one. But if you stick to black-hat SEO you may get quick and instant results, but they will probably be very short lived. There are varying degrees of search engine optimisation in between.
Just as your account reduces your tax bill as much as possible but keeps you within the law, your SEO consultant should optimise your website as much as possible but keep you within the search engines’ guidelines.
We offer SEO in Salisbury, or anywhere else for that matter, and always offer varying degrees of white-hat SEO providing our clients with maximum benefit for minimum risk. We understand black-hat SEO, but certainly wouldn’t advise or implement it; it’s not worth the risk.
If we were accountants, we’d be the ones that save you the most tax, but allow you to sleep easy at night knowing that HMRC will not be knocking on your door.