Instant Gratification and Search Engine Rankings

The Real World

The above scenario plays itself out day after day. Discouraged entrepreneurs leave the Internet without ever getting their e-business off the ground and never understand why their business was destined to fail. Most leave poorer, having paid for a "professional" web site design, those magic key words and one or more "instant submit to 4billion search engines" programs.

Fortunately, many other business professionals learned as children that instant gratification often provides cheap toys that break in an hour. By our teen years, some of us learned that spending our money on a quality product pays dividends in the long run. The same lesson runs true with obtaining sustaining search engine rankings that produce paying customers.

Some businesses promising quick search engine rankings have indeed studied the way search engines work. Unfortunately their quick study provided only information sufficient enough to develop tricks that temporarily increase rankings for real or imagined customers who then provided glowing testimonials. Check back with these people in a couple of months. Better yet, drop by the major search engines and see if their site still pops up high on the list under normal search terms you would use to find their product or service.

"Beating the rules" happens in every system. However, as we all know, when those who beat the rules become prevalent enough, the rules change, usually to the detriment of the rest of us because we all receive another hoop that must be jumped and a more complex system with which we must deal.

Quick Doesn't Mean Quality

Want an even better reason why circumventing search engine rules does not work for the long run? Let's look for a minute at how search engines work, or at least the intent behind search engines and the rankings given by the search engines.

For the purpose of this article, we put aside those search engines that charge for rankings, selling top slots to the highest bidder. These are really entities unto themselves and frequently not the most attractive search engines for consumers really looking for products and services relevant to their needs. Instead we will deal with web crawlers, the Open Directory Project (now providing search information to Yahoo, Google and Netscape), Alta Vista and those search engines and indices that actually review and rank web sites in one way or another.

First and foremost to be ranked, your website needs to be submitted to the proper categories for the specific search engine with clear and concise information as to the content of your site. Short cutting the submission effort by using tools that submit your site to hundreds of search engines (many of which no one uses much) produces mixed results since most search engines build their own category structure. The more specific the category, the higher ranking provided to pages actually containing this specific category information.

Very specific categories developed out of search engines answering the consumer's need to exclude sites containing the words the consumer used for their search which were not related to the consumer's contextual meaning of the search words. Specific categories assist the consumer in getting to your site if they are indeed looking for your product or service.

The meta data within your site should also reflect your site content, providing keywords, meta tag descriptions and page titles that equate to contextual words the consumer will use when searching for information about your product or service. Equally important, the actual content of your site needs to bear out the meta data and the category information you submitted. (Note: the term meta data as used here encompasses page titles, keywords and key descriptions.)

Content backing up meta data is probably why Sam Slow's purchase was not effective. The best keywords for one site are not relevant for another. Rich content in conjunction with site appropriate meta data is crucial to high site ranking.

Trickery to Obtain Site Visitors. Does it Work?

There isn't much use in using the ever-popular word "sex" in your meta data and submitting your site to the entertainment category if you sell vacuum cleaners. Why? Simple. People looking for sex sites and entertainment usually don't stop and purchase vacuum cleaners. Remember, visitors don't always equate to quality site visitors and therefore sales.

So while beating the rules laid down by search engines may provide temporarily gratifying results, sooner or later you are back to square one, needing high search engine rankings that produce customers interested in purchasing your product or service.

Those of us that have been around the Internet for a while know one thing for sure. Search engines and web crawlers continue to change their formulas for ranking sites in order to provide more relevant results to users. If you use trickery to get your placement in a search engine, there's a good chance your high rankings will vaporize as soon as the formula for ranking changes. Down go the rankings, down goes the site visitors. In the mean time you run a great risk of having your site ignored by the search engines because of the trickery.

When optimizing your site for search engines it is critical to think of the process as a long-term investment for your site. If done correctly the first time, maintenance of your rankings with search engines becomes much less time consuming and definitely more productive.

Next Page: Preparing for Search Engine Optimization

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