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.
About the author:
Dale Goetsch is the Technical Consultant for Search Innovation
Marketing (http://www.searchinnovation.com),
a Search Engine Promotion company serving small businesses
and non-profits. He has over twelve years experience in
software development. Along with programming in Perl,
JavaScript, ASP and VB, he is a technical writer and editor,
with an emphasis on making technical subjects accessible
to non-technical readers.
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