MaineBusiness.com

Why Can't Search Engine Companies Guarantee Results?

Who doesn't like a guarantee?

Many Web site owners are intrigued by offers that guarantee page one placement at the search engines. After all, no one wants to spend a lot of money and find that they aren't ranking any higher than they did before.

But think about if you owned a bed and breakfast. You can guarantee your visitors clean sheets, a view of the ocean, and a fine dining experience. What you can't guarantee them is that they'll have a good time. Or that it will be in their top 10 weekends of all time.

It may be that they have a lot of great weekends. It may be that it rains. It may be that they get sick, or hungover, or they have a terrible fight with their significant other. There are just too many variables out there.

Likewise, psychologists can't guarantee you complete happiness, plastic surgeons can't guarantee that the object of your affection will fall in love with you, and a career counselor can't guarantee you'll have your next job for life.

The same is true with any legitimate search engine optimization company. They can guarantee that they'll be professional, that they'll do the appropriate research, that they'll make recommendations based on previous experience and success, but they can't guarantee you'll be on page one.

Maybe you have too much competition. Maybe the keyword phrases you're targeting are too broad or off-target. Maybe you're unwilling to add the necessary content to your image-heavy home page. Maybe Google or Yahoo changes their algorithm next week. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

So how do companies that guarantee you page one placement get away with it?

1. They use pay-per-click ads that appear on page one. Nothing wrong with this approach, except it could be expensive. Also, if they're leading you to believe this is natural search results at work, that's misleading.
2. They're using underhanded, black hat SEO tricks that probably will rocket you into the top 10 results...and then get you banned just as quick. Many fly-by-night search engine firms use this slash-and-burn technique, and then you'll spend a LOT more money with a legitimate SEO company trying to get back into Google's good graces.
3. They're lying.

I know you want to rank on page one at Google. But so does all of your competition. The best long-term, sustainable approach to search engine success is to continually add quality content that your customers are interested in and organize and present it in a way that the search engines can also understand.

The Splogs Are Coming, The Splogs Are Coming!

It seems like we geeks just keep inventing new words, doesn't it?

Let's start with some definitions:

Blogosphere: The unfortunate name for the world of blogs. The totality of all blogs make up the blogosphere.

Splogs: Spam blogs, generated by "bots" (computer programs) often used to lure visitors to a page on a specific niche to get them to click on Google Ads and make money for the owner...without actually providing any service.

Splogosphere: The more unfortunate, completely unavoidable, moniker for the world of splogs.

Ping: A computer term meaning when one computer says "hello" to another computer to see if it's there and to check its status. In blogging, bloggers ping news aggregators to let them know there's a new post on their blog. Standard operating procedure for any business blogger.

I recently got an email from Lynnelle Bianco of Bold Vision Consulting and fellow blogger here at MaineToday.com with her Making It Happen blog. She passed along an article that stated 56% of pinging blogs are spam, and asked me how this affected the small business blogger.

Great question, Lynnelle!

The problem with splogs is that they negatively impact the signal to noise ration on the Web. Just like how spam has hurt our ability to communicate via email, splogs fill up the search engine results, clog our niches, and reduce the ability for people to communicate on the Web.

What's worse, is splogs often steal content off of other blogs as a way of generating their "own" content. For a while, every day I found a blog that had "scraped" content off of one of my blogs to lure visitors to that site.

Today,  Search Engine Roundtable reports that 75% of Google's Blogspot Blogs Are Spam. Google offers free blogs, which are often used by content-scraping-spammers, to get people to their splogs. Once there, the visitor realizes that the content is barely legible--spammers often scrape just keyword rich phrases, not the entire post--and all that's left to do is to click on a contextual Google ad. And who makes money off of these ads besides the splogger? Say it with me:

Google!

If Google wanted to take this seriously, they'd require blogs to be up for 6 months or so before being able to sell Google Ads. That would make it much more work for sploggers to make money, especially since other people could report them to Google in that time and Google could take down their free blog.

Now, how come Google hasn't thought of this yet?

If you do find a splog out there in your journeys selling Google Ads, it's easy to report them:

1. Click on the words "Ads by Google"
2. Click on the words "Send Google your thoughts on the site or ads you just saw" (near the bottom of the page.)
3. Ignore the beginning of the survey and click on "Also Report a Violation?"
4. Choose "The issues were with the website".
5. Choose "This site violates the Adsense Policies in other ways."
6. Fill out the blog, reporting this as spam.

I know that seems like a lot of work, but it only takes 30 seconds. Plus, it's your duty as a citizen of the blogosphere!

Three Questions To Guide Your Online Success

Before starting on a new Web site or a revamp of your current site, you need to answer the following three questions. How important are these questions? They're some of the first questions we ask prospective clients after, "that's a pretty name...how do you spell that?"

Who's Your Audience?
Remember, your Web site isn't about you, it's about your customers. Knowing who your clients are will help you write your copy addressing their needs and concerns, not what you want to sell them. We ask clients to give us their top three audiences and to focus on them.

What Are Your Business Goals?
The point of building a Web site should be more than just having one, it should be to build your business. What features, pages and elements go onto the Web site should all support your business goals. Again, we ask our clients to prioritize their business goals and provide us with their top three.

What Do Your Visitors Want to Accomplish at Your Web Site?
This will vary from Web site to Web site. Do visitors want to see examples of your work? Do they want to learn who you've done business with? Do they need more information so they can make an informed decision? Do they want to purchase something online? Do they want to contact you quickly and easily?

Put yourself in your prospects' shoes and try and determine what they want to do at your site. Once again, we ask our clients to prioritize their list and provide us with the top three visitor goals.

Once you feel confident you've answered these three questions, write the nine answers at the top of every document you use while developing your site...these core answers will help guide you as you build a Web site that will attract qualified traffic, convert prospects into customers, and grow your business.

Drive More Traffic To Your Web Site

Would you like to drive more traffic to your Web site? Rank higher at the search engines? Understand how a blog or podcast could attract more prospects and customers? Would you like to know about new forms of Web marketing, like social bookmarking and tagging?

Well, we have just two spots left for this Wednesday's Working Lunch Seminar at flyte: Building Traffic at Your Web Site.

The session goes from noon - 1:30 and includes lunch. For details, directions, and to register for one of the last two remaining spots, be sure to check out our Web Marketing Seminars page.

How to Build a B2B Web Site

If you're audience is other businesses, you need to have a B2B approach for your Web site. Galen De Young provides a lot of helpful advice in an article entitled B2B Search Engine Optimization: Driving Conversion.

This is the 2nd article in a series, and this one focuses primarily on different incentives you might offer at your Web site to build trust and establish your expertise with prospective buyers. She covers newsletters, white papers, podcasts, case studies and more.

While not all of the elements might be right for your business, it's about testing out different campaigns to see what works, and using analytics to measure success and failure.

Sounds pretty holistic to me.

What Is Holistic Web Marketing?

Too often Web site owners focus all of their attention on ranking well at the search engines at the expense of building a Web site that will convert this traffic into business. Or, they spend a lot of money on a Web site design, but never sink dime one into promoting their site. Or they build up a big email subscriber base, but don't know how to get these subscribers to take action.

The problem is that these site owners are focusing on just one element of their Web marketing, instead of viewing their Web marketing as a whole.

Web marketing these days takes an integrated, multi-faceted approach if you want to succeed. To better explain how to create a more effective online marketing plan, flyte has created a model called Holistic Web Marketing.

You can learn more about Holistic Web Marketing at flyte's blog.