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Typical Stages of Search Engine Marketing
Unfortunately, as is the case in any journey you don’t usually get from point A to point B without a few detours, delays and course corrections. Learning how to get your website ranked on search engines is much the same. Even though search engines have evolved over the years most individuals who are just learning about search engine marketing experience a similar journey.
The Search Engine Submission Stage
You’ve created a website and now you’re interested in search engine marketing. But now what? You ask your website developer for assistance but he really doesn’t know how search engines work – he just builds websites. So you search online for some professional - yet affordable - assitance. You find hundreds of automated search engine submission services that promise to get your site listed on search engines for only $19.95 a month – its that easy! But you tell yourself, “there’s got to be more to it than that”. If it were that easy everyone would be doing it.
The Meta Tag Development Stage
The next day you awake and realize that your website still doesn’t have any visitors to speak of. The phrase “build it and they will come” is quickly loosing credence in your mind. So you do some more research and learn that your website needs to have its Meta tags optimized, or something like that. So you find a free automated tool to help you optimize your Meta tags and you go ahead and pay $19.95 for your first website submission. So you now you wait. And wait. And wait. Still nothing. Its been 2 weeks and still your website doesn’t have any website visitors. What’s going on? You decide to contact your website designer.
The Despair Stage
Again, you ask your website designer how to go about getting ranked well on search engines and he tells you that its impossible – but you know better. You’ve seen websites with good rankings in search engines so you know it isn’t impossible. You go back to square one and start researching again. While you are researching you learn about something called “search engine optimization” or SEO.
The “Hit A Brick Wall” Stage
So now you know that there is much more to search engine marketing than simply paying $19.95 a month for automated search engine submission and messing with your Meta tags. But you still aren’t sure how to get your website ranked high in search engines. You read a number of articles on search engine marketing but there is so much conflicting information that you can’t make heads from tales. Some articles say you should focus on your website’s content, others say linking is the key to your success (but you don’t know what linking) is and other say you can only get your search engine listed in search engines if you pay the search engine.
The Fool-the-search-engines Stage
So you decide you are going to learn as much as you can about SEO and you start to read more and more about search engine marketing. The more you read the more you start to think that there must be some sort of trick that the other websites are using in order to be ranked high in search engines. You learn about keywords and decide to place the keywords you want to show up for throughout your website. You also find out that you need a lot of keyword specific links to your website so you pay a lot of other websites to link to your site and you join a link exchange program. Now you’re starting to feel pretty smart so you tell a buddy of yours about your technique for getting your site listed at the top of search engines and he tells you that your attempt to “spam” the search engines won’t work. You’re not sure exactly what “spam” is but it doesn’t sound good. Time to rethink your attempt to trick the search engines.
The Reassessment State
So if people aren’t tricking the search engines into ranking their websites’ high what are they doing to garner high rankings? You decide its time to role up your sleeves and get serious. You visit a “search engine optimization” forum online and learn that packing your website full of keywords in an attempt to get high rankings not only doesn’t improve your chances of getting high rankings but that it may actually harm your chance or getting ranked. You learn that search engines look for “natural” looking text that isn’t stuffed with keyword phrases. You learn that exchanging links is the end all to search engine promotion. Slowly, but surely things are starting to make sense.
The Fast Fix State
You’re behind! You’ve been promoting your website all the wrong ways for the last two months and you’ve lost a lot of time. So now you have to put your promotion efforts into super drive. So you go back to back to the Internet and ask your search engine optimization forum friends if there’s a way to get your website ranked quickly. The resounding answer is NO. In fact, the common feed back it that Google and other search engines only rank popular sites that have been around for a while.
Aaaaaaugh!
The Resolution State
You reconcile to the fact that there is no “quick fix” to getting your website listed in search engines. Marketing your site via search engines is going to take time and effort, just like building a traditional business offline – and a search engine marketer is born!
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