Search Engine Success - some facts and myths
This page gives some facts regarding dubious claims made by some search engine optimisation techniques to set the background and expectations for a successful seo project.
The best results come from knowing your business, monitoring your competitors and from regularly improving your website pages.
Guaranteed top rankings
No one can guarantee top rankings on Search Engines unless they are using unlikely Search Queries or there is no competition (so be very wary of anyone making such promise). The only way to guarantee that your website will appear on a search engine page is to have a more relevant web page than the competiton.
Here are a few facts and myths to help you understand the issues.
The competition
If you are selling the same thing as many others you need to stand out from the crowd. In web terms the potential competition is everyone in the world doing what you do with a web site.
Standing out from the crowd means coming up on the first page (first 10 places) of a search engine. If your business is reasonably unique this will be relatively easy, otherwise it may not be realistic to expect to get a top ranking without a lot of effort over a sustained period.
(Unless you pay the search engine to put you at the top in the sponsored links section - opinion is devided on this approach because most people know your website has paid to get there so this may invalidate your web site in their view.)
‘.. listed on 500 plus search engines…’
If you have a web site you have probably had dozens of emails offering to get you listed on many search engines. I'm sure you have seen emails like:
"'Dear ....,
I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and
directories..."
There are only a handful of widely used search engines – there are thousands of lists of web
sites attempting to fill a perceived need. Most are unlikely to have any real impact on most websites.
There are also many link exchanges or link farms - they are generally considered to be invalid by the search engines who may well penalise you for participating (spamming).
These services are automated – in that a standard set of data is sent to each of a long list of search engines by a computer program. BEWARE - This may be ok for the minor search engines but the main ones are too important to be dealt with generically and are against every major search engine's terms of service so you may get penalised for using automated submission. Therefore for the main search engines you should make a tailored submission and deal with any issues reported.
Search Engines are in competition so they work differently
Therefore setting up a site to get the best results from one search engine may not get the same result in another search engine.
Results don’t always come quickly
Typically crawler search engines work on a monthly cycle so your site is unlikely to get listed quickly. Human edited search engines are totally dependent on their resources matching their current demand. It isn't uncommon for it to take many many months to get reviewed. Some offer the option to pay a one off inclusion charge to get a listing quicker. Some people find that they have to submit their site to the search engines month after month before they get a listing.
Things change
All your competitors with a website may be trying to improve their search engine ranking. Search Engines change their parameters to "improve" their results and weed out the cheats on an ongoing basis. To become successful and remain successful is likely to be an ongoing task.
Are there ways to cheat the search engines
At any one time there are likely to be some ways to cheat (get a better ranking than you deserve) the search engines. However the objective of the search engines is to provide the most relevant results to your search query. Therefore they do not want to be cheated. They are constantly trying to filter out the cheats and do remove offenders from their listings.
Next : >> Types of search engine