Instant Gratification and Search Engine Rankings

No wonder marketers and promoters of products and services often tell us how their product or service will provide us with an instant solution to a problem or issue.

But, is instant gratification always a good thing?

We all would love to push a button and receive top ranking from search engines for our web sites. After all, what we have to tell the world must be information for which everyone has been waiting! Our product or service is the best and we just can't wait for visitors to the Super Highway to discover us so we too can become millionaires.

The problem is that sometimes life just doesn't seem to work the way we've been promised. There's a used car salesperson personality on every corner. These types of marketers make unrealistic claims, but it works! As P.T. Barnum told us, there's a sucker born every minute. Hype works because we want instant gratification even though we should know better.

Let's run through a common scenario of the person who builds an Internet site and is ready to take the Internet by storm. We will call our friend Sam Slow.

The site is up. Four hours pass. Not one single visitor! Sam figures his ISP must not be forwarding those orders.

Four days pass. Forty-five visitors! No sale orders yet, but people are coming! Oh dear, the visitors' log indicates those forty-five visitors originated from our friend's frequent (45 to be exact) trips to make sure the host's connection is active.

Four weeks pass. Sam's frequent checks on the server have scaled off a bit, but the visitors' log reveals that he is still the only visitor to his site. Gosh, those special meta words Sam bought for a princely sum were guaranteed to enhance his site traffic. Better try to track down that superhighway street vendor Sam made the purchased from. Hmmm, that street corner on one of those free sites seems to have disappeared.

Oh well. Sam Slow decides it must be time to submit his site to the search engines a couple more dozen times a day and repeat those dream meta keywords over and over and over. It's certainly easier than having to think something up. Besides, these words are special; the ad said so. They came with a money back guarantee to drive 3 million people to our friend's site within 3 days! (Too bad Sam can't find the site again.)

Four months pass. Sam is now are a proud subscriber to several dozen sites that all promised to increase his web site rankings in the search engines. We should mention that Sam's pocketbook is a bit sore. Each subscription produces a bit of a different method, but the cost is more varied than anything else. Unfortunately Sam's site best ranking is still number 1,152 and that's on NoOneEverHeardOfUs.com search engine. Worse yet, no customers. Our few site visitors seem to see Sam's homepage and move on. This Internet E-Commerce stuff must not be ready for prime time.

Next Page: The Real World

This article originally appeared in the November 9, 2000 edition of the WebReference Update Newsletter.