The Truth About Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

You have a website and now you want to be listed on the first page of a search. Or perhaps you have been called on by an SEO company (let's call them ABC SEO), and they have promised you that they can get you listed on the first page of Google. That is, you will be one of the TEN listings on the first page returned by a Google search. GREAT!

When performing SEO, the first thing someone will ask you is which KEY WORDS do you want to associate with your website. Okay, let's pretend you are a moving company and you want to use the following key words and terms:

Fine. Now let's even assume you have cleaned up your site, updated it, added the recommended meta tags and key words to your site's body text. NOW your ready to be found on the first page of a search in Google. ALL RIGHT!

However..

In case you did not know, there are other moving companies, not just in your area, but also nationwide and worldwide. The chances are pretty good that ABC SEO has called on some of these other moving companies. Let's assume they have provided this same service to 20 other moving companies. They also promised these other companies they would come up first in the search engine listings.

How can this be possible?

If ABC SEO has optimized 21 moving companies websites so that each one will be on the first page of a Google search, and there are only 10 listings on that page, how can all 21 companies be listed? IT'S NOT POSSIBLE.

The reality is that there are literally thousands of SEO companies making the same promises to tens of thousands of moving companies around the world all looking for that first page listing on Google and ALL of them using the same key words you are using.

If it were possible for Vision Quest (or any company) to simply 'tweak' a website so it would come up in the first page of the major search engines, we would already have retired. Unfortunately, regardless of all the claims made by companies selling Search Engine Optimization, there is no holy grail to search engine ranking.

Let’s use a real world Vision Quest client as an example. Beverly Hills Transfer, located in Gardena, California, has been a great client of Vision Quest since 2001. Let’s do a Google search for ‘gardena moving company’. On this day the Beverly Hills site came up number one out of 52,600 listings. This may be a typical search for people living in Gardena but this would not be the average search phrase for someone living outside of Gardena.

Click to view search results

Now let's do a search for ‘Beverly Hills transfer’. Again Beverly Hills came up number one of 907,000 listing. This should be the case because this is practically the domain name for the website. However, once again this would not be a search phrase that the typical user would use because they probably would not know the name of the moving company. If they did, they would not need to search for the company in Google.

Click to view search results

Let’s now use search words that the typical searcher would use, ‘moving & storage’. No surprise here, out of the 31,200,000 listings, Beverly Hills was nowhere in the top 10 or 12 pages.

Click to view search results

This result is because in just the US, there are an estimated 35,000 moving companies. However, the internet is not limited to just the US, it is worldwide and there are hundreds of thousands moving companies worldwide. The majority of US and international movers have websites and all of them are using the same basic key words. (Moving, moving & storage, storage, boxes, crating, packing, local moves, office moves, etc.) Beverly Hills’ small site has very little chance of being found among the thousands of huge sites related to moving and storage.

However, the news is not all bad. The CMSA, another long-time Vision Quest client, is listed on the first page of the search using the phrase 'moving & storage'. The California Moving and Storage Association (CMSA) is a non-profit trade association representing over 450 licensed and insured movers operating in California. Here is an example where size on the internet matters. The main reason the CMSA website comes up so high in the search listings for this generic search phrase is that the site has almost 1,300 linked pages, whereas Beverly Hills Transfer’s site has about 20.

The good news for Beverly Hills is that Beverly Hills is a member of the CMSA, as such, they have a better than average chance of someone finding their website even though their site is not listed on the Google search page. This is because associations such as the CMSA provide credibility and a searcher is likely to visit the CMSA to learn about quality companies. They will likely visit the CMSA Mover Directory and now can find Beverly Hills.  Also, because Beverly Hills has a banner on the primary search page of the Member Directory, they improve their chance of being found even more.

Click to view search results

Additionally, the inbound links to the Beverly Hills' site from the CMSA, AMSA, FIDI, and the Chamber of Commerce websites improve search listings for Beverly Hills because search bots follow links from other sites. This makes being a member of industry organizations or chambers of commerce worth the investment if they provide links from their sites to yours.

Also note that of the 20 or so top van lines in the country none were listed higher than the CMSA. If the major van lines, with large marketing budgets, hundreds of agents each, and hundreds of web pages on their sites, cannot get listed higher than the CMSA, the chances that a small company being listed on the first page of a search are very remote

The bottom line is that here is NO real way to influence the search engines without spending lots money. Why?

Search Engine Companies do not reveal their Search Criteria

There are many "experts", claiming they know exactly what search engines are looking for, but it's not true. There are some some general guidelines one can follow, however, no one knows EXACTLY what search engine criteria are. Only the software engineers who work for the search engines know their search methods and they aren't telling.

Search engines never tell people exactly what they are looking for when they try to match web sites to searches that their users perform. And to make it even harder, they change what they look for regularly. At any moment, they can change what they are looking for, and any good results you are enjoying will vanish. It happens all the time.

Search engine companies are so secretive about what they look for when selecting web sites for searches because they don’t want anyone to be able to influence the results in their system. It compromises their "editorial integrity". Every search engine has software engineers whose sole job is to make sure that the results they show people are of high quality. They don't want anyone "hijacking" their search engine using any tricks or inside knowledge.

So how does anyone make their pages do well in search engines?

It takes countless hours of experimentation, comparisons, testing, and retesting. There's nothing exact about it. It's all really educated guesswork. And in the end, after doing all this work and coming up with a successful strategy, success can and will be taken away when the search engines change their selection criteria. You end up having to start all over, again and again. One prominent company in this industry estimates that it takes about 30 hours per week for an individual to keep up with the search engines for one web site.

Even if the search engines did divulge EXACTLY what they look for, in detail, then everyone would know it. Everyone would quickly make the same changes to their websites and then everyone would be back to search engine frustration.

There is no such thing as "Guaranteed Search Engine Listing Results"

When you launch a new website you will want to know how to get your site listed at the top of a search engine. Because SEO companies know this, you will get a flood of spam (unsolicited) e-mails declaring "guaranteed search engine results". The "guarantee" is supposed to give you enough confidence to send them money.

We have already explained that the search engine companies do not share their search methods. In addition, search engines change their search algorithms on a frequent basis. Because of this, where your web site appears listed on their system can change radically from one day to the next or even one moment to the next.

Knowing this, how can anyone give a guarantee with any real credibility?

Search engine companies do not have agreements with any company providing them the actual methods they use. Since search engines jealously guard their credibility, refusing to let outside sources have any real influence or control over search results, the guarantees of search engine optimizers must, in turn, have zero credibility.

Let’s look at a classic guarantee example:

"Guaranteed Top 10 Results or Your Money Back"

Make sure you read the fine print to find out:

• What search engines do they guarantee your site to list on in the top 10?

Google, Yahoo, Excite, Dog Pile, Fred’s List, Sally’s List? (There are literally hundreds of search engines on the internet.)

• What specific Key Words will be used to list you in the top 10?

Are these key words related to your industry or simply your exact domain name? (It is almost a sure bet that if you put your domain name in a search engine search, your website will be listed on the first page.)

• What duration will your site be listed in the top 10? (One day, one hour, once only?)

Let's assume that one day you go to Google, you do a search for some variation of your key words, and there you are, in the top 10, just like they said. Hurray! The next day though, your site is not on the first page, nor the next week, more the rest of the month. Want your money back? Sorry. You did get a top 10 result, didn't you?

OKAY

Enough about the negative side of SEO. Let's talk about what you CAN DO to help your search listing opportunities.

CONTINUE