As the Internet is beginning to cater to a high volume of sites from almost any industry, the need for optimizing your rank to search engines is getting high importance that sometimes could make us very problematic. I know the feeling of trying out all web marketing schemes, doing almost every tips and how-tos you read from experts, but ending up on the same rank and traffic stat. What could even get worse is that at times, the harder you pull your sites ranking on search engines, the more its placing would turn out to be undesirable rather than better. This is the real challenge for everyone, whose business lies online. I seem to agree with James Lewis good observation that the sad truth is that there are lots of sites that rank #1 on most search engines given the contents are not drawn well in terms of grammar, right punctuation marks, etc. If and only if there is a real way of determining which sites are good and real in content, and which ones are not. But this is impossible, thus, many resort to mastering the hidden algorithms used by major search engines. The 12 points shared by Lewis may be helpful to out beating those sites that do not deserve to be on the top. Here is the brief version of his 12-point SEO discussion: 1. When you begin to learn more about SEO, try to master copywriting techniques too. Do not trust yourself that you could beat those high-ranking sites with just your SEO tactics. Learn the right way by making a good content site while doing web marketing. 2. Measure everything and analyze the numbers you see on your web logs. Do not trust any software that does all the observation of stats for you. Be able to recheck the stats yourself. 3. Do not believe on sites or other services, which says that you get a #1 rating on Google. The truth always remain that it is nearly impossible to get such ranking. 4. Do not be gaga submitting to all search engines you found on the web or falling into the service offer your site to over 50 thousand search engines submission. The fact is that 4 major search engines bring 90% traffic on the web. So, why do you still need to submit to over 50 thousand? 5. Pay-per-click is not really desirable for your web marketing campaign. Once the pay is over, then your stat would be over. Make a marketing tactic that would last and improve in the long run. 6. You may wonder how everyone, mostly tagged experts on SEO, is saying that their success is a major secret. Actually, SEO tactics are no secret. They are all based on common sense, hard work, and continuous monitoring. So do not even trust services that would not tell you how they do their SEO. 7. To save cost on marketing, you could do the rest of the SEO task yourself and divide the rest with a trusted marketing firm. SEO, again, does not require complicated procedures, anyone could do SEO because most of the steps are easy to learn and do. 8. To further save money, one could hire a good marketing firm to do the initial tasks like planning, budgeting, and sample procedures. If everything is okay, you could continue the work load. 9. Receiving steady upward rank and traffic to your site is too good to be true. But in a sense, in SEO, this is true. A steady upward movement at times, follows a crash. Normal and healthy effective SEO is one that maintains a desirable number of hits but at times move a few notches down. 10. Effective SEO techniques require a process and time to develop. Be suspicious for any marketing firm who does this. 11. Did you now that accumulating lots of links, even the ones that are not necessarily connected would penalize your site? Most major search engines are already on the look out for these sites. So choose links that are related and have good content for your site. 12. Do not indulge yourself to only knowing the facts and figures around SEO. Be able to know more about your business and the industry you are into. Becoming a master of your own field of expertise would very much contribute to your success. |
