Search Engines - 4th Quarter 2005

Seasons Greetings.

We at Clearbuilt would like to wish you and your family a wonderful and safe holiday season. Here is our newsletter for this quarter and our gift to you is we won’t waste your time with unnecessary words.

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year

Neal

Their Dirty Little Secret

It’s the holidays and nobody has time to read a lengthy story about search engines. And let’s face it, what could be more boring than a geeky, detailed story about all the search engine war games being fought by webmasters speaking a language that not even a 4 star general could decipher.

Hi, I’m a SEO expert that will increase your back-linking to a better PR as well as optimize your meta data, keyword density, and frequency resulting in a high SER.

Now place your hand in the air and say it with me, “Whatever!”.

Instead, I want to climb to 30,000 feet to provide an instructive overview of the search engine market.

Search Engines From 30,000 Feet

It’s simple right? Users want to find the info they are looking for and content providers want the users to find the information they are providing. What could be easier?

Consider this. The search engines walk a very thin line between pleasing the users with relevant search results and displeasing the content providers enough to drive them to buy ads. I daily read the generally respected authors on search engine ranking strategy and nobody talks about this. Maybe it is too obvious, but let’s go ahead and state it more clearly.

Their Secret If webmasters (like me) could easily get free traffic for their clients by getting their website high in the search engines, then why would they buy ads?

How Do I Get Free Traffic Then?

Defining Free Traffic Links from search engines that the content provider does not pay for are often referred to as “Organic” links. The result is “Free Traffic”. The alternative is to pay for traffic by purchasing ads.

There are numerous methods we can employ to improve the amount of free traffic you get from the search engines. I promised no geek-speak, so I will not go into them here. Oh, and no…you cannot get your site listed in the top 10 search results of over 500 search engines for a low one-time fee of $99. Sorry.

The important thing to note is that it takes time and thus patience. You modify your website, then see what happens. A couple weeks to a month later you make additional changes and measure the results. There are cases where websites get lucky and are ranked high in one or more search engines and receive a significant amount of traffic. However, a high ranking is much more likely to be the result of an initial 6-12 months concerted effort and diligent maintenance thereafter.

Conclusion

The number of weekly press releases from Google, Yahoo, and MSN is staggering. It is nearly impossible to keep up with the latest in the realm of ideas to improve their bottom line and what impact each might have on usage and ranking. However, it is helpful to keep in mind how the search engines make money… with ads.

So, the battles will continue. Patient tweaking is your only weapon. Let us know if we can help.

Filed by nb on December 15th, 2005 under ClearPoint