| On SEO and getting traffic for your website |
|
|
|
|
There is more hot air written about SEO than virtually another other subject ... except for faith. All of the SEO 'tricks' added together will make some impact. But even if you were hyper-successful and raised your SEO rank 100 fold you might still only move from position 3000 to position 30 in any given 'popular' search - and you need to get into the top 5 to make a real difference. SEO can involve huge efforts of time and some money and deliver next to nothing. It simply cannot be relied upon to deliver traffic. To deliver traffic you need to advertise. The truth is, that programmatic changes you might make to tags and other parts of the code can make some minimal changes to your rankings. But if that's all it took everyone would use them by default (and abuse them by default to boost their rank). In fact they used too, but ceased to do it, because to Google such programmatic changes that affected results works against their objective of delivering the most relevant listing for any search. For Google the most important think is links into your site for any search phrase. And the easiest way to do this is to advertise on a widely spread affiliate marketing program - such as Google AdWords. Now you see why Google are the massive money making machine of the Internet.
I have a recent example of a client of ours who were happy with their worldwide No.1 position for a popular and relevant search - which bought them loads of traffic. But they would not except that this position was linked to their long term and constant AdWords advertising which we had set up for them. They believed that their 'name' had been established and that the website was doing the magic. They cancelled the advertising, and have now disappeared entirely from the first ten pages of results for the same search they used to top. They have turned off all of their traffic. Realising the truth of what we have told them they have restarted advertising but will now have to wait months to re-establish their position. Regarding SEO, the primary reason that other websites rank higher than you is that they have a higher Google 'PageRank' (download the Google toolbar and you can see the PageRank of sites you visit). The exact calculation of how PageRank is derived is Google's most closely guarded secret, and something they are constantly evolving to overcome any SEO tricks. However suffice to say that popular websites have high page rank. However 'sites' is the wrong word , as PageRank is calculated for each page of the 227 billion pages in the Google index. Most rank PR 0. If a page with rank links to another page they leak some of that rank to the other page, but by doing so they donate PageRank to it (although its generally postulated that unless the donor page is exceeding PR4 or above its not worth it) . PageRank is a logarithmic scale so PR3 is 10 times PR2, which is ten times PR1. The scale goes up to PR10, and the world's largest websites (Apple, Adobe, Google, etc..) enjoy PR10. Therefore if you had a link from Google.com's front page to your homepage your PageRank would rocket, and because your home page is linked to the others on your site the inside pages would be boosted too. If this happened you would be top any search phrase you wanted. If your competitors have great links (or huge volumes of links) they willbe ahead of you. If you could get the same links as them you'd see the same result. But in reality, for most business the sites you are likely to reach out to will have much more modest PR's. Mostly below PR4 on the pages where they would actually link to you, and the impact these would have would be insignificant. So this takes us back to what I said about absorbing a lot of time, but achieving little in practice. If you can identify some key, high ranking, sites that will give you a link back from a high ranking page to your site you should approach them and try and get it. But generally speaking programs of 'link farming' and 'link swapping' are fruitless (believe me I have tried) - these techniques are also spotted by Google and are rendered ineffective. One technique that can work really well is to appear as a guest writer on other high ranking websites, or have your articles published on them (with links to your site of course). If you get any of these opportunities take them - but I guess you do anyway.
Back to advertising. Comments (0)
 Write comment
|
Subscribe to this comment's feed
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|