People who are not involved in website promotion (otherwise known as SEO - search engine optimization) can easily think that website promotion in search engines is "no big deal". You just scatter a few keywords through your web pages, and register your site with the search engines. And, in fact, up to about 10 years ago, this was actually the way to promote your site. However, since then, the field of website promotion has become much more complex, and a lot of time and effort is needed to promote each website.
Over time, more and more websites have been created, and the battle over positioning in the search engines has become fierce. Some sites accumulate seniority and popularity, and their position in the search engines improves continually, even without any specific website promotion activities. Other sites, with lots of promotional activities, just don't move. Companies that are paying "top dollar" for website promotion want to see results, here and now, and this is exactly where the problem lies:
You see, the "here and now" is a thing of the past, website promotion in the search engines has become a long-term activity, in which no-one is able to promise results. If someone promises you results (and I mean results in what is known as "organic" search, i.e. the way regular people search the web), you had better go and find yourself another company.
The market is flooded by website promotion companies and freelancers that present themselves as website promotion experts, and you have almost no way of differentiating between real experts, and fakers. By the time you can tell the difference, you may very well discover that you have wasted your money. One tip I can give you – if you are promised that your site will be in the top 10 search engine results within a specified time, you can be sure that you are dealing with fakers. Logically, their claim must be false. Let's take an example. You are interested in promoting a website for a business dealing in irrigation systems of a particular technology. There are only another 2000 businesses like yours in the world. We will assume that only 1000 of them have a website, and only 50 of them are paying to actively promote their site on the internet. This means that 10 of these businesses will be happy, and the other 40 will be angry that they are spending good money on promoting their site, they were promised that their site would be in the top 10, but it is not.
In short, if your business is such that you are the best in the world, your chance to place at the top of the search engines is probably high. However, the more businesses there are, working in your space, the smaller your chances are of being top of the pack – simple logic.
Beware, "Gray Hat" Website Promotion
On one hand, there are many who try to cheat the search engine spiders and robots, by massive use of hidden keywords on a site, use of large numbers of keywords, satellite sites, link farms, and other techniques. On the other hand, you have the search engine folks industriously working on the search engine algorithms, making them more and more complex, in order to neutralize these shady activities in an attempt (unsuccessful, so far) to punish the sites using these techniques, by removing them from the search engine results.
You are standing in the middle, and just want to promote your website in the search engines. Without basic knowledge in the field of website promotion, you will probably do more harm than good. There are activities that if you use them, will make the search engines believe that your site is one of those types of sites that conspire against them – by using gray hat techniques. I have come across many instances in which lack of knowledge and experience has led to websites being completely blocked from the search engine results. One of the goals of the seminars and courses that I give in the field of website promotion, is to understand all the unethical practices that can cause you website a lot of harm, and of course, to know which ethical practices will help you promote your site.
Spiders and robots are the loyal emissaries of the search engines. Each search engine has its own spiders and robots, which scan the internet looking for pages to index, so that the search engine can rank each page, at a later stage, based on the relevance of the keywords to that page. The goal of each search engine is to show the human surfer, on the first page of the search engines results, a list of the most relevant web pages that it found for the phrase that the surfer typed in. The search engine has to be sophisticated enough to be able to detect the relevant keywords on each webpage, without falling for all the dumb tricks that websites use, like including the keyword many times in the same color as the page background, or including large numbers of keywords, like a shopping list, in order to enhance the keyword density, or other unethical gray hat practices.
In general, the search engines attempt to resemble human surfers, and to "read" the page as humans do. However, as these lines are being written, no search engine really does it as well as people. The search engines look at the "code" of the web pages, which includes special tags, links, file names, text and picture tags. An amazingly beautiful flash website, or a site whose homepage comprises of one picture that is worth a thousand words, will not pass the test of the search engines. What the search engines will see is a page with one line, where the rank of each keyword is equal to zero!!!
Professional Website Promotion
Over the years, the search engines' algorithms have become more and more complex. Today, these algorithms are among the most well-protected secrets in the industry. There is no website promotion company or expert who knows exactly what is in these algorithms. All the knowledge today is based on gathering of evidence, and experience. You won't find any two experts in the field of SEO and website promotion who will give you the same numbers, for example the number of months between visits by the search engine robots to the same website. Every time we think we've discovered a particular technique that the search engine algorithms use, almost immediately the algorithms change, so that the technique (if it even existed) also changes. All that is left for us, professional website promoters, to do, is to closely follow the changes that happen over time, and try to anticipate the next move of the search engines. In the meantime, we have to promote websites in a reliable fashion (as will be discussed in other articles), without using gray hat techniques.
Translated by Debi Zylbermann
