Search Engine Optimization

Anyone who has looked for help on search engine optimization has found millions of sites, articles, posts and self proclaimed gurus. Each one has created a new strategy and formula for what works, they each claim they have the answers, oh and each one wants your business. Want to know the big secret that none of these gurus want you to know? There is no sure structure to seo. No one in the world has a standard step by step formula to follow that will guarantee results.

Now you may be saying to yourself that I am crazy or I don’t know what I am talking about, but let’s take a look at some of the facts. Google is the number one search engine in the world. Every marketer that performs seo work for a living tailors their efforts around being listed in Google first, then follows up by seeing the effects their campaign has had in the other search engines. This of course is the best method to get potential customers to find your site. Get a high listing in the most widely used search engine…..makes since right?

So what is the problem? Google will not release the facts of how to get a high ranking in their search results. They simply won’t tell us what to do. They use hundreds of factors to determine how their search engine algorithms rank sites and these algorithms are changing on a constant basis. So if we don’t know what Google wants, it changes all the time and they won’t tell us what to do, how do these marketing firms get results? They test strategies to see what affect is has on their efforts. They test, test again, test some more and even split test those tests. Then they take what is working at the time and apply it to their efforts on behalf of their customers. Then they continue to test new efforts while watching to ensure the efforts they applied are still working.

Ask any marketing firm and they will tell you that search engine optimization is an art, not a simple step by step do this and you will be number one formula. What works for one company in their particular market will not work for another company. The steps for optimization change with every little detail of a business. As a marketer we have to factor in dozens of pr-existing details into how we are going to structure your particular strategy as an individual case. Every decision you make changes that strategy along the way. I am referring to even small things like your logo. Your logo on a page influences that page’s load time, color scheme, spacing options, bounce rate, placement of additional images and location of those images and all this influences how that page ranks in the eyes of Google.

For instance, let us assume you designed a logo and placed it on your home page. That logo is an image file and has to be loaded with the page. Google measures how long it takes for your page to load and uses that as a factor in determining your position in the search results. Not only that, the customers viewing your site are the most impatient people in the world. How long do you wait for a page to load? Have you clicked off of a site just because of the looks of the site? That changes the bounce rate of that site and is also a factor when Google determines your priority. Even your site name is a big influence on your rank.

If you owned a dog walking business, you would want the domain name dogwalkingbusiness.com. This is what is known as a “dead on” domain name. With this name search engines would give you extra credit as being an authority on the subject since your name is the subject. The farther away your domain name is from your actual subject matter, the harder it is to rank for that subject. That is why a keyword list is so important in today’s marketing world. It guides the efforts of the marketing firm that is doing the search engine optimization of your site. It also is deadly important to the links they should be setting up for your campaign. Links are, at the current time, one of the most important determining factors of a sites rank.

Here is a prime example of links in action. If you search the term “click here”, you will see that a page from Adobe.com is in the top position on every search engine. Now click on that link, look at the page and you will see that on this page the term click here isn’t present anywhere. Not even the individual words by themselves are present. Do you think this page is trying to rank for these specific keywords? No. If any strategy were present it would be aimed at the key phrase “adobe reader” and that isn’t even the case. They have this rank because hundreds of thousands of other sites have included a link in their own pages that say something along the lines of “if you don’t have Adobe Reader click here now” with the words click here now as a hyperlink to this particular Adobe page.

As you can see, search engine optimization is in fact something that has to be considered from day one with the building of a foundation for your online presence. It is not a collection of steps that can be taught and utilized forever, it is an art that has to be tested regularly and changed on an inconsistent basis. Now I am not saying it is entirely a guessing game where getting results is chance or luck. I am saying that a true marketing firm knows what works today, uses it for their clients and is working on finding out what will work tomorrow. Search engine optimization is something that is ever evolving, constantly shifting and has to be monitored, tested, applied and retested to ensure the results are something that we want to continue. I do not consider myself a guru, but I do consider myself to have a lot of common since and some skill with the internet.