You’ve seen the ads: Guaranteed #1 Ranking! There are no guarantees in search engine marketing and website promotion. If anyone tells you different, you should check quickly to make sure they don’t have their hand in your wallet.
Suppose you sell widgets. You want to sell more widgets, and the way to do that is to make sure that more people know about widgets, and that you are the place to buy their widgets. You might decide to buy a half-page ad in a national magazine to tell your story. When you place that ad, you are “guaranteed” your position.
With a magazine advertisement, you know what the magazine’s circulation is, who reads it, and which page will feature your ad. The magazine can guarantee all that, because they own the medium.
Search engine marketing is qualitatively different. When you work with a search engine marketing firm to promote your website, they cannot guarantee where your listing will appear. Certainly there are types of online ads where there are guarantees in place: banner ads priced at “cost per thousand impressions”, pop-up ads, and so forth. These are like traditional media buys, where you are working directly with the owner of the medium where the ads appear, but this is not search engine marketing.
Even so-called pay-per-click search engines cannot guarantee your position. In Google AdWords, for example, it is not just the price you pay for a given keyword that determines where you will rank. They also bring in other factors, including how often your ad is clicked-on, to determine which ad will be listed first. Just throwing money at them will not necessarily get you into the #1 spot.
The bottom line is this: search engine marketing professionals do not own the search engines. They can tell you that you will achieve #1 ranking on a given search engine, or they can tell you that the moon is made of green cheese, but there is no way they can make either of those happen. When you tell Time magazine you want your ad to be on the back cover, and you pay them enough money, they will guarantee you the back cover. If you tell your search engine marketing people you want to be #1 in AllTheWeb, they cannot guarantee you that result. They can recommend changes to your site that will increase the likelihood of your ranking higher, but that is a long way from a guarantee. If you don’t control the medium, you can’t guarantee the result. Since your search engine consultant doesn’t control the search engine, there is no way they can guarantee your position.
The ranking algorithms of the search engines are a closely-guarded secret. The search engine wants to give top ranking to the site that is the best match to an individual visitor’s search query, not to the site that was able to “beat” the system. That is where the value of real search engine marketing comes in.
While the search engine marketing person cannot guarantee you a position, what they can do is to apply years of experience to tell you what has worked in the past, and to help you make it work today. In many ways, “organic” search engine optimization is really a matter of editing web pages or whole sites to make them the most search engine friendly they can be. Making sure that a given page has just the right combination of keywords, title, links, and so on, is really at its base simply a matter of making that page the best web page it can possibly be. The page that will rank the best in the search engines is also the page that will make the most sense to the human visitor. Rather than relying on tricks to try to make the page rank high, it is a matter of just making the page the most focused and on-message that it can be. The bad news is that this doesn’t guarantee which position in the search engine rankings that page will occupy on a given day. The good news is that the page will always rank well.
The search engines change their algorithms from time to time. If today’s rule, for example, is that just the right combination of text in the title tag will make or break a site, and you know this is true, then all you have to do is to tweak the title tag to fit within that rule, and you will automatically rank very high. Today.
Suppose that tomorrow, however, that rule is changed. Suppose that now the most important factor that the search engines use to rank a site is the content of the META Description tag. All the work you went to yesterday to fix the title is now useless. All of your attention is now focused on fixing that description tag.
Clearly, over time the focus of the search engines will vary. The best way to deal with this is to not deal with it! This means that rather than tweaking a site one way today and another way tomorrow, the best way to approach optimizing a page or a whole site is to not try to beat the system. Instead of trying to “psych-out” the search engines, why not add value to the site? A “common sense” approach to search engine optimization, looking for long term results, is the way to go. When you try to help a site rank better by making it the best it can be, everybody wins.
Dale Goetsch is the Technical Consultant for Search Innovation Marketing, a Search Engine Optimization company serving small businesses. He has over twelve years experience in software development. Along with programming in Perl, JavaScript, ASP and VB, he is adept at technical writing and editing.
(dale@searchinnovation.com)
Copyright ?2002-2004 Search Innovation Marketing. http://www.searchinnovation.com All Rights Reserved.
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Written by SEO Tipster on April 17th, 2006 with no comments.
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(A Reflective look at the little search engine that soared!)
All knowing, all seeing, ever present!
Google has permeated into almost every aspect of life on this planet and beyond. It has become a mainstream fixture for computer and Internet users around the globe. All the while, cementing its position as the only real facilitator of the world’s collective intelligence.
Can you remember a day when you have not Googled?
But Google’s reach doesn’t stop with the mouse or the cursor. It has moved beyond the computer screen, snapping up resources, sites, and people at a frighteningly steady pace. Perhaps, the first indication Google wasn’t just satisfied with staying within the wired confines of the world wide web was when it partnered with universities such as Harvard, Oxford, Stanford and others, to scan and index the contents of their libraries — then making this material accessible through Google Print.
Then it casted its aspirations heavenward with the introduction of Google Maps and Google Earth. Mapping services that bring the world’s geographic information into view, it is as if Google had literally ascended, watching us from far and near, tracking our every move as well as our every keystroke. Even using satellite imagery to provide it with eyes in the sky; leading one to wonder, from those lofty heights can divinity be far behind?
All kidding aside, Google, whether it wants to or not, is developing a god-like reverence in the eyes of many. But is this such a leap of faith? Is the idea of Google as a god-like force in our lives so preposterous? so ludicrous? so sacrilegious?
In prehistoric times, pagans used to worship the sun gods. Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome all had their gods who satisfied the basic human need we have to believe in a superior being or force. They even raised ordinary humans who displayed unusual courage or bravery up to a god-like status. Are we now entering into a new post-modern pagan era — will we be worshipping at the feet of Google?
Not really, we treat all our knowledge givers with respect, some even reach a god-like status. We raise them up above the crowd, give them special meaning or reverence in our lives. Humans have been doing this since we stood upright and walked on the plains of Africa. The shaman or high priest of ancient times — holders of the secret rites, holders of a group’s history or knowledge; we show these people respect and we elevate them to a higher status.
Google falls into this category.
And Google does deserve some respect, as far as the search engine market goes, whether it’s wearing a halo or a cursor — Google is still the only game in town. According to Alexa, a company that tracks web traffic, the top three sites on the Web are 1. Yahoo, 2. MSN, and 3. Google. However, when you compare where people go on these sites — search.yahoo.com accounts for only 9% of Yahoo’s traffic and search.msn.com only 7% of MSN’s total traffic; whereas most of Google’s traffic is search traffic. This is a big distinction.
And what about the purchasing power of these search engines; latest data presented by Score Networks, Inc. shows MSN searchers at 48%, Google searchers at 42% and Yahoo at 31%. That is Google searchers were 42% more likely to purchase online than the regular Internet user.
Another aspect of Google’s commercial might is its online advertising system. Through its Adsense and Adword programs, Google has commercialize and monetized most of the web’s free content. Depending on your opinions or stand, this may be good or bad. Regardless of viewpoints, Google has been more than generous with sharing this ad
revenue with all concerned parties — content providers, web writers and journalists, professional bloggers, ordinary webmasters and marketers — all have reaped the benefits of these programs.
If you feed it with fresh high quality content — Google will take good care of you! In many cases, it can be argued that Google is subsidizing or facilitating the creation of quality content on the Net through its Adsense program.
Google’s dominance of all aspects of the Internet is also taking on a god-like force. It is acquiring and building at an almost god-like speed. Google Acquisitions include: Outride, Blogger, Neotonic Software, Applied Semantics, Ignite Logic, Genius Labs, Picasa, Keyhole, Urchin software… how did all this madness start?
Initially called BackRub, referring to the way it back linked to web sites, Google was founded by Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google, the name itself is a play on the word googol, and refers to the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros… opened its doors on Sept. 7, 1998, in Menlo Park, California. It had a corporate staff of three. In 2004 Google offered its IPO with a price per share at $85. By June 7, 2005, Google was worth $80 billion, making it one of the world’s biggest media companies.
Perhaps, one of Google’s most brilliant (some believe absurd) moves, happened just recently. It has applied (via Nelson Minar, a Google Engineer), for patent rights to transmit ads through RSS feeds. Few people know, even more won’t believe, but the Internet has undergone a fundamental shift in how information is exchanged on the web. RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’ and was first popularized by blogs because blogs use XML and RSS feeds to syndicate their content.
Don’t come to us, we will deliver. People can view a site’s contents through RSS readers or an RSS equipped browser without actually going to the sites.
RSS will revolutionize the Internet. Microsoft in its Longhorn Statement has announced the next version of Windows will have RSS integrated into its Operating System. RSS applications, under the Creative Commons license, will change the way we use our computers and the Internet.
Google, if it is successful with this patent application will build on its already god-like status. The stakes are enormous and Google knows it. This patent could put Google directly into the mix, but the rewards are beyond belief! And that’s not all, there are rumors Google may be developing its own RSS powered operating system and browser. Why not, it has the resources and financial clout to easily carry out such an undertaking. Google is already the owner of the domain name “gbrowser.com”!
One can only wonder, is Google positioning itself to not only be the brains of the Internet but also placing itself into the very core of the nasty beast? Does it desire not only to be a mega hub, but also to be an innate part of the whole structure? Positioning itself, in essence, to becoming the web’s nervous system.
Any movement of data, information, or commerce on the Internet will have to pass through and be affected by the Google Factor. More or less, cementing Google’s influence on the whole scheme of things. And in the process, further weaving Google into the very fabric of our lives.
Now if that’s not God-like, nothing is.
Everyone is profiting for Google, find out how you can too! Click here: Google Cash File. Get a Free Desktop Calendar & Planner compliments of the Author and DATEwise.
Copyright ?2005 Titus Hoskins
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Written by SEO Tipster on April 17th, 2006 with no comments.
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