Here we go, again. I've been considering our marketing strategy for 2007 (I know, I know -- we'll get our name fixed, I promise) and have come to a few conclusions. First, I'm not very good at coming up with fresh ideas for a young, hip software company because my attitude is neither young nor hip -- I'm really quite square once you get to know me. Second, there is no magic solution for Search-based marketing. Let me repeat that for the naysayers: No matter what the web page you're reading says, there is no magic solution for Search-based marketing. Could I be wrong? Certainly. But before you dismiss my conclusions, let's take a look at the steps I took to get here.
To begin, the topic of Search-marketing is really subjective. What does success mean? Some savvy business-owners might say that being on the first page of Google's organic search results is successful Search-based marketing. That statement itself seems subjective, as Googling "Brandon Kelly" will list this blog as #6 on the organic links, but "great software" won't bring you to this site even once. Why is my blog on the first page of these results? I've hardly taken any actions to market this content. After all, the NCAA and the entire cast and fan-base of Beverly Hills 90210 are hungry for the first page search spot, aren't they? Apparently, the rank and position of search results changes with every pass through the Google index, so what's here today is quickly gone tomorrow. As I recall, this caused quite a bit of controversy several years back. It doesn't appear that the position of a particular search result as a response to a search inquiry has much to do with the level of effort committed to marketing that search result.
If the success of search-based marketing isn't found in the first page of a search engine's organic results, where does it lie? Is it in Alexa ratings? We know business owners pay attention to these scores, but it's unlikely you're putting your children through college with your claim of "being in the top 30,000 website's on the Internet". In addition, I've seen some business owners get frantic to the point of being in a panic over these scores. Something that should be considered is that Alexa ratings are produced by users of the Alexa toolbar, not the Internet itself. I submit that this is also a subjective way to look at the web and paints only a small piece of a larger picture.
I'm afraid that these definitions of success are just not going to work. For the sake of this article let's define success in search-based marketing as the ability to directly link profit ($$$) to human traffic brought to a web page by a search engine. A simpler way to measure this will be the monetization of a page on your website. Now that we know how to define success in this scenario, how do we respond to guru's that claim they can bring success to search-engine marketing programs with their approach. Let's start with a look at some of their tactics:
- Meta Tags
While meta tags are a useful means to describe the content on a web page, and should be placed strategically in each page, they're not the holy grail of search. They were so badly abused in the late 90's that most search engines ignore them altogether when formulating rank and only use this information to provide the description text displayed in a search listing.
- Cloaking
Cloaking is the process of displaying one set of content when a search robot comes to index a website, and another set of content when a user views the same page. You can increase your search ranking by employing this mechanism for some time, but it's an extremely risky venture. This behavior is frowned upon (to say the least) by search engines, who have developed a business model on their ability to organize and promote good content on the web. When search engines become aware of a website that employs this tactic, it's likely that the engine may take action to remove that website from their index altogether.
- Link Farms
Link Farms are intricate groups of website's that provide many outbound links to different sources and can use those links to further promote a particular website in the farm. These sites have no practical value what-so-ever other than to provide "food" for search engines to crawl. The degree of success that a business can have using this tactic has decreased significantly over the past couple of years as search robots have become increasingly aware of this phenomenon.
- Paid Advertising
Paid Advertising is one of the only real legitimate methods employed by most SEO guru's to attract attention to a website. There's nothing wrong with this medium except it's price. Paid advertising should be used sparingly and not as a substitute for good content. Unfortunately, all too often SEO firms claim they can put results on the first page and then later tell you that this result is a paid advertisement. This is cheating as it serves to increases the cost associated with the monetization of a page's content.
- Garbage Content
I haven't seen as much of this lately because I simply stay away from website that employ this mechanism. The idea is that a website owner will place a large amount of content with relevant keywords of their business emended in each page to increase it's visibility to the search index. If you sell chairs, for example, you'll list every brand of char conceivable at the bottom of each web page on your website. The search algorithms have become increasingly aware of this and quickly discount the repeated content on each page.
I'm sure that there are numerous other magic answers to the Google issue that I haven't addressed in this post, but there is a recurring theme here. Each of the above "cheats" produces limited success yet offers businesses that employ these tactics a substantial risk -- developing a dependence on search-based marketing efforts that don't have a long life-span. Most businesses scale their costs with their revenue, which makes sense if those same businesses have the ability to scale back costs when revenues drop. If you're a website owner or business owner and thinking about employing these cheats as your marketing strategy, consider these alternatives first.
- Provide lots of good, honest content on the fore-front of your website that shows how you're knowledgeable about the services or products you're promoting. If you're not much of a writer, hire one.
- Follow Google's webmaster guidelines to the best of your ability.
- Develop a Google Sitemap.
- Register with as many directories as you can. Most of these are maintained or at least reviewed by human beings -- so you'll want good, valuable content for them to see.
- Supplement your website with limited sponsored advertising. Use that revenue to invest in your own paid advertising programs.
- Use your great content to form valuable business partnerships with other prominent website's inside and outside your industry. After those partnerships are formed, ask to write some content for your partner's website that adds value to their offering and provide a link back to your website.
- Syndicate your valuable content in different formats (RSS, VHTML, etc.) making it accessible to more people in more places.
- The same standards that the U.S. Government developed to allow web content to be accessible to the handicapped (Section 508) work very well for creating content that is easily indexed by search robots. Be standards compliant.
- Use social bookmarking services to create more inbound links to content on your website. These links are a great way to create a snowball effect but require that you have good and popular content first.
- Use analytics to track the effectiveness of content on your website, and more importantly the monetization of that content so you can see how effective your efforts really are. Don't already have analytics? Try Google's -- it's free.
And there you have it, 10 great ways to promote your website's content for better consumption through search (and not a scam amongst them). Look for more of these hints in my upcoming series: Increase your revenue online in 15 exciting new ways!