Search Engine Optimization And The Magic Fairy Dust

There is only one thing that all webmasters agree upon... They all want to be at the top of the search engine results for search terms that will drive traffic and consumers to their website.

The truth is that the search engines are like our childhood game of King Of The Hill. Only one person can be at the top of the hill and the top of the search results. Only ten websites can be on page one of the search results. Another must be removed when a new website moves into the top ten.

For any given search term at any given time, there are only ten web pages on page one of the search results and millions of web pages that did not make page one, which may or may not catch a few stragglers from the search engines.

How Can A Website Break Into The Top Ten?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an industry that has sprung up around the concept of helping clients improve their rankings in the search engine results.

When you talk to SEO professionals, they generally point to a two-pronged approach to search ranking optimization. A website owner needs to optimize their on-site real estate for the search engines, and they need to build inbound links to their website.

On-Site Search Optimization Challenges

The trick with on-site search optimization is to cater to multiple audiences on your website.

* You must provide simple navigation and an attractive interface to the human visitor;

* You must provide good sales copy to your human visitors for the purpose of converting them from shoppers to buyers;

* You must provide text copy for the search engines to read; and

* You must optimize your content to help the search engines know what topics and keywords they should pay attention to so they can give their users the right web page for the correct search terms.

A web page that draws good search rankings is useless if the web page cannot convert the human visitor to a buyer. Many website owners get caught up in optimizing a web page to get it to the top of the search results, and they forget that the human visitor knows where the Back Button is in their browser. Once your visitor has hit the Back Button, they will go to someone else's website and buy from them instead of you.

Most website owners have an alternate problem. They consistently convert a significant number of visitors to buyers. Still, they have to rely on various forms of paid advertising to get visitors to their websites since they do not rank in the search engines.

I recently spoke with an individual who spends,000 per month on pay-per-click advertising to get targeted traffic to his website. He said he consistently earns back his money, but he was still looking for a better way to get ranked in the search engines, so he joined my client list.

On-Site Search Engine Optimization Basics

According to search engine companies, more than one thousand calculations determine how well a website will rank in their search engine result pages (SERPs).

Google engineers are fond of saying that if you build your website for human beings instead of search engines, your website should rank well in their algorithms. To a certain degree, this is a good strategy.

Think about how magazines are constructed:

The Table Of Contents shows story titles, brief descriptions, and page numbers telling you where you can find a story.

The title will be in big, bold font on the story page. Sometimes, the magazine will include a brief blurb about the story in italics or font a bit bigger than the story font.

Pictures support the story with captions that further develop the story by describing the image.

Major subsections of the story have their subheadings. And the primary body of the story is in regular plain text, with only an occasional bolded or italicized word or phrase.

By analyzing the title and other large text on the page, a person flipping through the pages of a magazine can quickly assess the story content and decide whether they want to read the whole story.

Most simplistically, this is how the search engines analyze a website's content to decide which web page will best serve its users' needs.

Off-Site Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Basics

Since the inception of Google, and with Yahoo and MSN recently, the number and quality of links pointing to a website play a significant role in determining how well a web page will rank in the search results.

People suggest that as much as 75% of the value given to a web page in the search results is based solely on the number and quality of links pointing to a web page. I believe a more conservative number (50.1%) will apply.

Inbound Links Are More Important Than Page Content

To prove this point, type "click here" without the quotes into Google, Yahoo and MSN and check the Adobe pages that come up in the search results: #1 in Google, #2 in Yahoo, and #1 in MSN. When you pull up those pages, search the page to find the individual words "click" or "here" in the text of those pages. They are not there. This has happened because millions of people have linked to these Adobe pages with the embedded anchor text, "click here."

Next, let's analyze those specific web pages from the perspective of each of the search engines:

* Google's #1 result - (Google PageRank 8). Links to this web page: according to Google (31); Yahoo (nearly 12 million); MSN (6,400).

* Yahoo's #2 result - (Google PageRank 10). Links to this web page: Google (15,200); Yahoo (700 thousand); MSN (32).

* MSN's #1 result - (Google PageRank 8). Links to this web page: Google (0); Yahoo (2.9 million); MSN (778).

Google's top result shows 31 inbound links total for that web page. But, Yahoo claims that there are more than 12 million links to this page. That is a huge difference.

On Yahoo's #2 result, MSN gives 32 links, Google gives 15,000 connections, and Yahoo claims it has 700 thousand links! That is another huge difference between the link counts from the search engines.

On MSN's #1 result, MSN shows a firm link count but is still nowhere near Yahoo's 2.9 million links. But how does a web page with zero links in Google get a PageRank 8?

What Do These Numbers Mean?

Google has always said that they will never show us all of the links that we have pointing to our websites because anything we can see in the public search results, our competitors can see also. So, it is no surprise that we cannot see all of the links that point to Adobe pages or to the connections we have created to our clients and ourselves by querying the search engines.

Also, the sheer number of inbound links does not rule the roost. Google's #1 result (PR8) is shown in Google before Yahoo's #2 (PR10) result.

The Proof For Link Building Is In The Search Engine Rankings

Recently, a fellow who works as an SEO "professional" told me that he believed my link-building system was a sham.

I showed him that on the top 51 keyword phrases we used to market our original commercial website, we had 11 number one results, 31 top five, 34 top ten, 47 top thirty, and 51 top 100 results within the Google search results. Additionally, it was shown that only three of those results competed with fewer than one million search results according to Google, with the remaining 48 pages competing with one million to 533 million pages.

The ole boy tore up Google to track how I could have accomplished what I claimed. He finally concluded that I must have been lying since Google would not show HIM how I could rank so well in their search engine results.

According to Yahoo, we have over 12,000 links from third-party websites. According to our site statistics, we received traffic from more than 16,000 unique web pages during 2006. And Google still swears that we only have 42 inbound links to our website!

Magic Fairy Dust

My nemesis concluded that since HE could not prove through Google how I was successful in getting good search rankings, I could not have accomplished such results by the methods I claimed.

Okay, I admit it.

I used Adobe's method to get to the top of Google's search engine rankings. I have a pocket full of magic fairy dust. Whenever I do not like how my websites rank in the search engines, I sprinkle my magic fairy dust on my modem.

If you don't like where you are ranked in the search engines, then I suggest you forego the search engine optimization companies and instead run over to the corner store to get your magic fairy dust. You might have to shop a bit, but it is out there.