The Myth of Guaranteed
#1 Ranking in Search Engine Marketing
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.
If you are thinking of buying an
SEO software application, here are some programs that actually
work as advertised and the reason why they are recommended
by FreeSEOTutorials.com
Seo
Elite: New Seo Software! The Grand Daddy
Of All Seo Software! Get A Top 5 Google Ranking In Under
30 Days!
www.SEOElite.com |
| |
| |
Still haven't found what you're looking for?
Search below to find what you need:
|
