Promotion Through Visibility
As long as there is an online audience, there will be marketers vying for those "eye-balls". Sites that provide Web search enjoy a tremendous amount of the online audience. According to Media Metrix they regularly comprise nearly all 10 of the top 10 visited sites on the Web. No wonder that during a time of turmoil with the so-called "dot com downturn", or "dot com failure", savvy marketers successfully promoted Web sites via search engines while other forms of online marketing plummeted to virtually nothing. Of course, it might not always be true that marketing via search engines is the most cost effective online marketing available, but it is true today. Web search engines will always be a primary place for advertisers to reach online audiences cheaply and effectively.
The history of Search Engine Marketing, (also known as Search Engine Optimization), goes back to 1994 when people were contemplating why certain sites ranked at the top for popular queries. In April 1996, Danny Sullivan, one of the first marketers to gather and compile search engine intelligence, published "A Webmaster's Guide To Search Engines", which became the most comprehensive guide on the subject. Today, his Search Engine Watch provides a tremendous wealth of information.
What Danny and others discovered was that the process of ranking sites for queries differed greatly depending on whether the search service was primarily directory-based or spider-based. In a nutshell, with the case of directory-based search engines, it is the site abstraction which must contain the query terms or a semblance thereof, and that the category name where the site is listed is even more important. Sometimes categories would be displayed without listing the sites themselves. In the case of spider-based search engines, one needs to learn important attributes of the search algorithm used for the purpose of ranking pages and to employ coding techniques on Web pages that would cater to those search algorithms.
Search services quickly realized that unsavory marketers were undermining their processes and affecting the quality of their search results. The word "spam", while often used to describe unsolicited Email, also describes crossing ethical boundaries with code tricks that are intended to distort search engine results and deceive the search audience. Ethical lines pertaining to spamming search engines (spamdexing) are not always clearly drawn, but this eGuide will attempt to steer you completely away from tactics that may land you in serious trouble with search engines.
A word about relevancy: Spam is limited not only to the use of subversive code tricks, but also involves "optimizing" for something for which a site is simply not relevant. Your particular market wise sense of relevancy is of little to no consequence when getting audited by a search engine representative. A site about Oranges is not relevant for Apples. It's Apples and Oranges! It makes no difference that Apples and Oranges are in the fruit category.
A word of caution: If you have a site about fruit, you cannot expect to be top ranked for the query "Apples". An Apple site that represents an Apple Orchard that grows nothing but Apples and sells only Apples is simply more relevant than a general site about fruit that sells Apples, Oranges and Bananas. If you try too hard to obtain a top ranking for "Apples", you might find yourself under the microscope of spam scrutiny. The more success you have with a query for which you are not perfectly relevant, the greater the chance that a more relevent site owner will challenge you. It may be the owner of an Apple site that sells Apple computers who complains about you. If it is found to be true that you occupy an undeserved position, your listing will be demoted or deleted.
We also caution that you refrain from being a "spam cop" site owner unless you are very certain that what you witness is true and ongoing efforts to deceive a search audience. Proceed at your own peril.
What to expect: If you have a site about fruit, you can expect to be found in fruit related queries. However, you need to expect that more popular fruit sites will rank ahead of you. This should not be thought of as a problem when you consider the amount of natural traffic you will obtain from following the advice in this guide. You should discover that obsessing over superficial and so-called "competitive" terms like "fruit" is meaningless and will waste your opportunities with search traffic that would have higher conversion rates using more specific queries. Besides, you will do better with competitive terms after you broaden your content in anticipation of more natural traffic from search engines.
There will be more about this subject later in Avoiding Spam.