SEO For Dummies, 6th Edition (2016)

Part I. Getting Started with SEO

Chapter 4. Beating the Competition - Planning a Powerful Search Engine Strategy

In This Chapter

Avoiding problems with your Web designer

Evaluating the competition

Understanding the search tail

Exploring the six search engine variables

Planning your attack

Search engine optimization is getting tougher all the time. Not because the techniques are any harder than they used to be (although in a sense, they are — after all, the tricks people used to employ don’t work as they did; see Chapter 9), but because it’s getting so much more competitive. As more and more people learn about SEO, more and more of your competitors are doing a better and better job at SEO, so it gets harder and harder to compete for those top spots.

There’s a lot to learn about generating traffic from search engines, and sometimes it’s hard to see the forest for the trees. As you discover in this book, there are page-optimization and link strategies and index submissions and directory submissions and electronic press releases and blogs and this and that — it goes on and on. Before you jump right in, I need to discuss the big picture (to give you an idea of how all this fits together) and help you decide what you should do and when (to help you plan your strategy). In this chapter, I show you how a search engine campaign works overall.

Don’t Trust Your Web Designer

Let me start with a warning: Don’t rely on your Web designer to manage your SEO project. In fact, I know that many of you are reading this book because you did just that and have realized the error of your ways.

Here’s one of the more egregious cases I’ve run across. The owner of a small e-commerce store came to me for help. He had paid a Web-design firm $5,000 to build his site, and before beginning, he had asked the firm to make sure that the site was search engine–friendly. Unfortunately, that means different things to different people, and to the design firm, it didn’t mean much. The site it built definitely was not optimized for search engines. The owner asked the firm what it was planning to do about the search engines. It told him that would cost him another $5,000.

This unusual case is worse than most, but the first part — that your Web-design firm says it will handle the search engines and then doesn’t — is very common. When I hire a Web designer to build a site for me, I explain exactly what I want. And you should do the same. (Thus, this book can help you even if you never write a line of HTML code.)

The problem is twofold:

· Web designers pretty much have to say they understand search engines, because all their competitors are saying it.

· Many Web designers think they do understand, but typically, it’s at an “add some meta tags and submit to the search engines” level. It won’t work.

Sorry, Web designers. I don’t want to be rude, but this is a simple fact, attested to by many, many site owners out there. I’ve seen it over and over again. Not trusting your Web designer or team — even if it claims it knows what it’s doing — is probably the first step in your search engine strategy!

Big doesn’t always equal better

By the way, don’t imagine that just because you’re working with a large Web-design team with extensive programming experience, such a team understands search engines. In fact, the more sophisticated design teams are sometimes the ones that get into the most trouble, building complex sites that simply won’t work well with search engines. I consult with companies big and small, so I’ve advised large design teams made up of very good programmers. I can assure you that large, sophisticated teams often know as little about SEO as the independent Web designer who’s been in business a few months.

Understanding the Limitations

You’ve probably received spam e-mails guaranteeing top-ten positions for your Web site in the search engines. You’ve probably also seen claims that you’ll be ranked in hundreds or thousands of search engines. Most of this is nonsense — background noise that creates an entirely false picture. As one of my clients put it, “There’s a lot of snake oil out there!” Here are the facts.

Sometimes, it’s easy to get a very high position in the search systems. For instance, a client wanted to be positioned in Google for six important key phrases. I built some pages, ensured that Google knew where those pages were (find out how to do this in Chapter 13), and waited. In just four days, the client didn’t just have a top-ten position or even just a number-one position, but the top two positions for five of the six key phrases. But this situation is very unusual. More commonly, the game takes much more work and much more time.

Typically, getting a high position isn’t that easy. You try a couple of techniques, but they don’t seem to work. So you try something else, and maybe you achieve a little success. Then you try another thing. Search engine optimization can often be very labor intensive, and you may not see results for weeks, and more likely, months.

The degree of work required depends on the competitiveness of the keywords you’re going after. Some keywords are incredibly competitive: mortgage, insurance, attorney, real estate, and so on are highly competitive, with millions of people wanting some of the action. Other phrases are very easy — such as rodent racing, for instance. If you’re in the rodent-racing business, you’re in luck because you can probably rank right at the top very easily!

Although how search engines function is based on science, search engine optimization is more art than science. Why? Because the search engine companies don’t want you to know exactly how they rank sites. You have to just experiment. Ranking a site can be very difficult and tremendously laborious. After all, why should it be easy? There is huge competition, so it can’t always be easy. If it were easy for your site, then it would be easy for your competitors’ sites, wouldn’t it? And, after all, there can only ever be one number one.

Eyeing the Competition

Some search terms are incredibly competitive. That is, many, many sites are competing for the top positions. Other search terms are far less competitive. How can you tell just how competitive your search terms are? Let me show you a few ways to figure it out:

· Search for your terms. This is not a terribly good method for those of you looking to build an SEO strategy, but it is so commonly recommended that I want to explain it anyway. Go to Google and search for a few of your terms. (I discuss keywords in more detail in Chapter 6.) For instance, search for zofran attorney, and Google reports, under the search box:

About 195,000 results

· This tells you that nearly 200,000 pages in the Google index match the search terms. Actually, most of these pages don’t match well. Most of the pages don’t actually have the term zofran attorney. Rather, they have the words zofran and attorney scattered around the page. It’s common for journalists to use this search method to make some point or other — to prove the popularity of a particular subject, for instance — without realizing that it makes no sense.

· Search for your terms by using quotation marks. Type search terms in quotation marks, like this: “zofran attorney.” This time, Google searches for the exact phrase and comes back with a different number. When I searched, it came back with 1,030 because Google ignores all the pages with the words scattered around the page, and returns only pages with the exact phrase.

Here’s the problem with these two techniques: Although they show you how commonly used the words are, they don’t show you how well the pages are optimized. Remember, you’re not competing against every page with these terms; you’re really competing with pages that were optimized for search engines. There may be millions of pages with the term, but if none of them have been optimized, you can take your newfound SEO knowledge, create your own optimized pages, and have a good chance of ranking well.

Getting a “gut feel” for the competition

So here’s another quick technique I like to use — a simple way to get a feel for competitiveness in a few seconds. Search for a term and then scan down the page looking for the number of

· PPC ads on the page: For instance, in Figure 4-1 you see Bing search results for the phrase personal injury attorney. As you look down the page, you see three PPC ads at the top of the page and then more ads all the way down the right side of the page. Lots of PPC ads indicate lots of interest in the phrase. If people are spending money on PPC ads, many are also probably spending money on SEO.

· Lots of local results: Google, Yahoo!, and Bing interpret some searches as local results; as explained in Chapter 12, in such cases the search engines try to figure out where you are and then display information about businesses in your local area. The phrase personal injury attorneyis definitely one that all three major search engines regard as local.

· Bold and highlighted words on the page: You also notice that Google bolds the words that you searched for. All the major search sites do this. Lots of bold words often mean well-optimized pages.

· Bold words in the links (page titles): Bold words in each page result’s link indicate that someone has been optimizing the pages. The links are the page titles, so the more bold text you see as you scan down, the more often site owners have been placing the keywords into the<TITLE> tags and the more competitive the search terms are likely to be. (At the time of writing Google is not bolding terms in the titles. It has in the past; perhaps it will again in the future.)

· Complete phrases on the page: The more frequently you see the full phrase you searched for, the more competitive the terms are likely to be. If the search engine returns mostly pages with the words scattered around, it’s not very competitive.

Figure 4-1: Searching for personal injury attorney brings up lots of bold text.

Here’s another example. Search Bing for rodent racing. What do you see? Something similar to Figure 4-2. First, notice the absence of PPC ads; apparently, nobody’s willing to pay to rank high for this term!

Figure 4-2: Searching for rodent racing brings much less bold text and no PPC.

Next, notice relatively little bold or highlighted text on the page, and none of the page titles (the links at the top of each search result) contain the full phrase rodent racing. Rather, the titles contain rodent and what the search engine sees as related terms; racer and road rage, for instance. You can see the difference between these two pages. The first search term, personal injury attorney, is far more competitive than the second, rodent racing.

Get your rodent running

Here’s an example of how quickly a page can rank for an uncompetitive phrase. I created a page optimized for the term and posted it to my Web site (http://Rodent-Engineering.PeterKentConsulting.com). Within a few days, the page was ranked number one on Google for rodent engineering and has remained there for several years. There you have an example of how quickly things can happen for noncompetitive terms. (In the real world, for competitive terms, things are far more difficult.)

How important is competitiveness? When targeting search terms that aren’t very competitive, you may be able to create a few optimized pages and rank well. In very competitive areas, though, creating a few nicely optimized pages isn’t enough. You must have links pointing to the site (perhaps many of them), and you may also need a large number of pages. In some really competitive areas, it may take hundreds, if not thousands, of links.

Why is my competitor ranking so high?

I get this question all the time. A client points out a competitor’s site and asks why the competitor ranks so high. “His site is not even as well optimized as mine, yet he’s still above me!” I often hear. And now and then I hear something like, “This guy was nowhere five months ago, and now his site is higher than mine!”

The answer to the “why is my competitor ranking higher” question is almost always that the competitor has done a better job at creating links. So if you are in this situation, do a link analysis on the competitor. (See Chapter 17 for information on how to do that.) You’ll see how many links that site has, what keywords are being used in its links, and what sort of sites it’s getting links from. It’s all useful information, and information that will give you an idea at how much link work you have to do.

Going Beyond Getting to #1

Everyone wants to rank #1 for the top keywords. Lawyers want to rank #1 for attorney or lawyer. Real estate agents want to rank #1 for real estate. Shoe stores want to rank #1 for shoes, and so on.

But what does being #1 achieve? You’re trying to get the right people to visit your Web site, not to get any particular position, right? Getting ranked in search engines is merely a way to generate that qualified traffic to your site. People often assume that to generate traffic, they have to get the #1 position for the top keywords. That’s not the case. You can generate plenty of traffic to your site without ever getting to #1 for the most popular phrases. And in many cases, the traffic arriving at your site will be better — the visitors will be more appropriate for your site. To draw the best types of visitors for your site, you have two things to understand: highly targeted keyword phrases and the search tail.

Highly targeted keyword phrases

If your keywords are very competitive, look for keywords that aren’t so sought after:

· Go local. One common strategy is, of course, to focus on local keywords. If you’re a real estate agent, don’t target real estate. Instead, target real estate in your area: Denver realtor, Chicago real estate, Dallas homes for sale, and so on.

· Focus on more specialized search terms. A realtor might target traffic on keywords related to commercial real estate or condos, for instance.

· Incorporate spelling mistakes. Some realtors target the very common misspelling realator, for instance. This technique isn’t as effective as it once was, because the search engines adjust for spelling mistakes, but it may still work to some degree.

Understanding the search tail

Specialized search terms are hidden away in the search tail. The search tail is an important concept to understand. Although the first few top keywords may get far more searches than any other search, when you look at the total number of searches, the top terms actually account for only a small percentage of the searches.

Look at Table 4-1 for search terms taken from Wordtracker, a great little tool that shows what search terms people are typing into search engines. I searched for video games, and Wordtracker returned 300 results containing that term. I don’t have room for 300, so I’ve shown the first few.

Table 4-1 Search Terms for Video Games

Look at the Searches/Day column. It starts at 9,132 searches per day for video games, but immediately drops to 859 for music video games. By the time you get to the eighteenth search term, it’s down to just 101 searches a day. Position 300 gets only 7 searches a day. This fact leads people to focus on the top phrases, where, it appears, most of the searching is going on.

However, look at the Cumulative Searches column. As you go down the list, you see the total of all searches from position one down to the current position. The first 18 keyword phrases account for 13,296 searches a day, of which 9,132 — 69 percent — are the top phrase video games.As you continue down, the cumulative number continues growing, of course. By the time you reach 300, the cumulative number has risen to 18,557, of which only 49 percent is the top phrase.

As you can see from the numbers in Table 4-1 and Figure 4-3, there’s this long “tail”; the searches tail off. Wordtracker gave me only the first 300 search phrases; certainly thousands more contain the phrase video games.

Figure 4-3: Searches tail off.

For each phrase, Wordtracker gave an estimate of how often the phrase is searched upon every day. And even in these first 300 searches, most are not for the term video games but are for phrases containing the term video games.

There’s more, of course. What if you look, for instance, for the term computer games? How about online games? How about searching for the term online video games? You get a completely different set of 300 keyword phrases from Wordtracker.

Thus, if you get matched only with the exact phrase video games, you’re missing 49 percent of the first 300 phrases, many of which — perhaps most — would be useful to you. Add the thousands of other related phrases, and the primary term becomes less and less important.

It’s essential that you understand that most of the action is not at the top; it’s in the search tail! This means two things:

· Even if you can’t rank well for a primary term, there’s still plenty of room to play.

· If you focus only on a primary term, you’re missing most of the action.

However, consider for a moment local search results (see Chapter 12). Small businesses that need to be listed in the local results may still want to target the primary keywords, for two reasons.

· Because you’re up against a smaller number of competitors locally than you would be for a national search, with a little effort you can often rank well for the primary terms.

· Locally, there will be far fewer searches for a term than nationally, so you may need to target the primary terms to get a reasonable amount of traffic.

Controlling Search Engine Variables

You have control over five basic variables, and a sixth that waits for no man. Everything in this book fits somewhere into one of these six categories:

· Keywords

· Content

· Page optimization

· Submissions

· Links

· Time

Everything you do will be with the intention of affecting in some way one of the first five variables, and as you work, the sixth, time, will keep on ticking. Here’s a quick summary of each.

Keywords

As you read in Chapter 6, keywords are incredibly important. They’re the very foundation of your search engine strategy. Keywords target searchers. You place keywords in your pages and in links pointing to your pages as bait to attract people to your site. Pick the wrong keywords and you’re targeting the wrong people.

Content

Content, from a search engine perspective, really means text, and as you read in Chapter 11, you need content, and a lot of it. Search engines index words, and you want them to index the keywords you’re interested in. The more words you have on your site — the more pages of text content — the more times your keywords can appear.

Think of a page of content as a ticket in the lottery: The more pages you have, the more lottery tickets you have. One common SEO strategy is to build huge sites, hundreds of thousands of pages, with vast amounts of text with keywords scattered through. Because of the nature of the search tail explained earlier in this chapter, each page has a chance to match a search now and then. The site has hundreds of thousands of lottery tickets. (However, it is important to keep in mind here that SEO is more than just creating massive amounts of content. This example is just an illustration of a common technique used in SEO strategies.)

You can play the content game a couple of ways:

· Create thousands of pages and hope that some of the text matches searches now and then.

· Create pages optimized for specific phrases that you know are used frequently.

Page optimization

Content is just a start. Content has to be placed onto the pages in the correct way; the pages must be optimized to get the most out of the keywords. As you read in Chapters 3 and 7, you must place the words onto the pages in the correct places and formats.

If a search engine finds the relevant keywords on your page, that’s good. If it finds the keywords in the right places on the page, that’s a really powerful thing that differentiates your page from your competitors’.

Submissions

In some ways, submissions — submitting information to the search engines; telling them where your pages can be found; and asking them, in effect, to come to your site and index it — aren’t as important as many people imagine. This may be one of the biggest scams in the business (a business replete with scams!) — the idea that you have to submit your pages to thousands of search engines, when in fact, up until mid-2005, it really didn’t matter much. You could submit, but the search engines would quite likely ignore the submission; links are what really counted. (Companies selling search-engine-submission services — “Submit your site to a thousand search engines!” — have, fortunately, all but disappeared; the exception is for local search, in which submissions actually are valid in some circumstances. See Chapter 12.)

However, in 2005, Google introduced a new concept, the XML sitemap, and was quickly followed by Yahoo! and Bing. This sitemap file is placed into your Web site’s root directory containing a list of links to all your pages so that the search engines can more easily find them.

The way to get indexed is by making sure that the search engines find links to your site; but you should also provide Google, and Bing (no need to worry about Yahoo!, because its data comes from Bing) with the XML sitemap to help those search engines find their way around your site. Read more about working with the XML sitemap in Chapter 13.

Links

Links pointing to your Web site are incredibly important in a competitive keyword market. If you’re targeting rodent engineering, you probably don’t need to worry too much about links (although every site needs at least some incoming links — links pointing to your site from other sites). But if you have lots of competition vying for your keywords, you won’t win without links.

Links are so important, in fact, that a page can rank in the first position in any of the three major search engines even if the page doesn’t have the keywords that have been searched for — as long as links pointing to the page have the keywords. I explain links with keywords in Chapter 17. The more competitive your area, the more important links become.

Time and the Google sandbox

Finally, the one factor you have little control over. You really have control over time only in the sense that the sooner you get started, the older your search-engine project becomes. Age is critical because the older the site, the more credibility the search engines give it.

There’s something known as the Google sandbox or aging delay. (Some people will tell you that these are actually two different types of time-related effects.) The idea is that when Google first finds your site, it puts it into a sandbox; it may index it, but it won’t necessarily rank it well to begin with. It may take months before the site comes out of the sandbox. (People talk about the Google sandbox, but it’s likely that, in theory at least, other search engines have something similar.) That’s the theory, anyway.

Reading history

I don’t know exactly how Google handles all this, of course, but you can be fairly sure that Google uses some kind of historical data to help rank pages. In fact, there’s even a patent application submitted in the names of various Google employees (although, strangely, without Google’s name itself on the patent) that discusses the idea of using historical data. (A long, complicated URL takes you to the patent, so I’ve provided the link at www.searchenginebulletin.com.) This document is wonderful bedtime reading if you’re looking for a way to get to sleep — without drugs. You won’t find an explanation of how Google ranks Web pages, but you will find a lot of interesting possibilities.

There’s a lot of debate about the effect of age; some say it’s critical, and that for about eight months your site hasn’t a chance of ranking well (I’m not in that camp), and others say that although search engines may take age into account to some degree, it’s by no means an overwhelming factor (that’s where I sit).

My belief is that if there are time-related weighting mechanisms, even a sandbox of some kind, they are not as powerful as many in the business claim. I’ve seen sites move upward in the search results very quickly. Time is certainly an issue; it takes time for the search engines to index your pages, it takes time for you to create links to your site, it takes time for the search engines to find the links, and so on. But having seen sites move quickly in some circumstances, I don’t worry too much about the “sandbox.”

It comes down to this: The longer your domain has been registered, the better, and the longer your site has been up, the better. So you have control over this essential factor in just one way: The sooner you get started, the better. Register your domain name as soon as possible. Get a site, even a few pages, posted as soon as possible, and get links pointing from other sites to your site as soon as you can. Get new content posted as soon as possible. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll start ranking well.

Determining Your Plan of Attack

Now you know what you’re facing. As you read in Chapter 1, you can more or less forget those thousands of search sites and focus on a handful. And, as I explain in this chapter, you have six essential factors to play with: keywords, content, page optimization, links, submissions, and time.

Forget about time — all I’ll say is, get started right away! As for the other factors, how do you proceed? It depends to some degree on your budget and the competitiveness of the area you’re working in.

· Do a keyword analysis. Regardless of competition or budget, you have to do one. Would you study for an exam without knowing what the exam is about? Would you plan a big meal and then send an assistant to the grocery store without explaining what you need? If you don’t do a keyword analysis, you’re just guessing; you will definitely fail to pick all the right keywords. See Chapter 6 for the lowdown on how to do this analysis.

· Create readable pages. If you want your site to appear, you have to create pages that the search engine spiders or bots can read. You may be surprised to hear that millions of pages on the Web cannot be read by search engines. For the lowdown on determining whether your pages are being read, see Chapter 3; to find out how to fix the problem if they’re not, see Chapters 7 and 9.

· Create keyworded pages. Having readable pages is just a start. Next, you have to put the keywords into the pages — in the right places and in the right format. The more keyworded pages, the better, too. See Chapters 7 and 11 for details.

· Consider Local. If your business sells locally, rather than Web-wide, you really should read Chapter 12 to find out what you need to do to your site to get it to rank when people search locally.

· Get listed in the search engines. When your pages are ready to be indexed, you need to do two things:

· Let the search engines know where those pages are.

· Get the search engines to include the pages in their indexes and directories.

See Chapters 13 and 14 for the details.

· Get other sites to link to your site. Check out Chapters 16 through 18 to find out how the number and type of links pointing to your site affect your rank.

The preceding strategies are the basics, but you may want — or even need — to go further. I cover these additional techniques in detail later:

· Register with other places. You may also want to register at specialized sites that are important for your particular business. See Chapter 18.

· Register with the shopping indexes. If you’re selling a product, it’s a good idea to register with the product indexes. In fact, most product searches are probably not even carried out through the general search engines, so you really need to read Chapter 15.

But there’s more. If you’re in a very competitive market, you may want to really push two techniques:

· Create large amounts of content. Make hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pages of content. (It may take a major effort, of course, and months, even years, to make it work.)

· Go after links in a big way. You may need hundreds, perhaps thousands, of links to rank well if your competitors have done the same.

In some cases, you may also want to consider the following techniques:

· Social networking: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, MySpace, and so on. Social networking can be a powerful marketing technique for some businesses. See Chapter 19.

· Video: You can use video in various ways to bring visitors to your site, too, and in some cases to help push your site up in the search ranks. See Chapter 20 for information.

Look Away a Few Minutes

People in the SEO business tend to focus, not surprisingly perhaps, on the search engines. For all the reasons discussed in Chapter 1 — not least the tens of billions of searches carried out at the major search engines each month — SEO people get tunnel vision and sometimes forget there’s a wider world out there.

I believe that an essential part of any search-engine campaign is to spend at least a little time thinking about where your prey are when they’re not at the search engines. Where are the people you are seeking hanging out when they are not at Google, Yahoo!, Bing, or some other search site?

What is online marketing about? (Any marketing, really.) It’s about position and messaging. It’s about getting a persuasive message (about why someone should hire you, buy your product, donate money, or whatever) in front of the right people. The search engines can be a critical component of such a plan, but they are rarely the only component. And, in fact, as search marketing becomes more competitive, marketers need to look more closely for opportunities to get in front of people on the Web in various other places.

Essentially, you should think about where your prospects are and how to reach them where they are. For instance, say that you’re an attorney. Where are your potential clients? Well, it’s true that many people search Google, Bing, et al for attorneys. But many are going other places (or searching at a major search engine and then ending up elsewhere). They are going to sites such as Avvo.com, Nolo.com, LawInfo.com, Lawyers.com, and so on. So the question then becomes, can you reach people through those sites? There’s a lot of experimentation required.

Sometimes you can buy your way in to those sites; that doesn’t mean, however, that every deal is a good deal — it’s a very common complaint in the legal industry that site x or site y costs a lot and provides little in return. On the other hand, there are often affordable opportunities. For instance, in the legal business many attorneys have found answering questions on Avvo.com to be very effective. In fact, community marketing (what I’ve been calling social networking for years longer than the term social networking has been in common use) is often a good way to go; an example is one of my clients, selling auto-parts for a particular sports car model, who is very well known in the community related to those sports cars — the forums in which owners get together and chat about their vehicles.

Here’s another example: Tens of thousands of businesses use Craigslist to market their services. I know people with active, profitable business who do nothing but promote through Craigslist. SEO is important, but don’t be blinded to other opportunities. Stop and think for a while: Where are your prospects going, and how can you reach them?

Two Things to Remember

Before I leave this chapter, I want to tell you about two things that are really worth remembering.

The first is that the ideal situation is to have a site that is so useful or cool or wonderful in some way that people naturally link to it. That’s really what search engines are looking for, and much of what is done in the SEO field is intended to simulate this situation. People find ways to create links to their Web site to make the search engines think that the site is so useful or cool or wonderful in some way that thousands of people are linking to it. Of course, the real thing is better than the simulated thing, but quite frankly it’s very difficult to pull off. If you’re selling ball bearings, just how useful or cool or wonderful can you make your site? There’s a limit to anyone’s imagination, after all, so you may have to play the simulation game — but keep in mind what the search engines really want.

The other thing I want you to know is that a site’s position in the rankings has a tendency to bounce around in the search engine field. Your site probably won’t be on an arrowlike upward trajectory, constantly improving in its search engine position — rather, it goes up, and it goes down. Here’s an example.

I have a client selling industrial equipment who really wanted to rank well for two particular terms (among many others); I’ll say phrase A and phrase B. Well, for a long time he was ranked pretty well, near the top of the search results, for both phrases. Then, sometime in the summer of 2007, things got “all shook up.” Not just his site but thousands of sites. Google changed something and continued changing that something over a period of weeks, and people found their search results dropping and then rising and then dropping again. Talk about a roller coaster....

Phrase A dropped like a stone. Once at position #3, it disappeared: It wasn’t in the first 100 search results. It was gone for several days and then suddenly reappeared for a few days. Then it disappeared again — in fact, it did this several times, bouncing up and down, sometimes near the very top of the search results and then completely unfindable. Meanwhile, through all this, phrase B remained rock solid, moving up and down, as search results tend to, among the first five results.

Then phrase B disappeared, too, and played the same game for a while. Then both bounced around, and finally everything settled down and both phrases ended up back where they were in the first place. Today, phrase A is in position #2 (right behind Wikipedia), and phrase B is in position #4; in both cases, the site ranks ahead of all the competitors. (In the second case, the phrase has another meaning, and most of the sites ahead of my client are government and education sites, which are often hard to beat.)

Now, this sort of fluctuation is terribly frustrating, frightening even. If your business depends on a high rank, any day your rank drops is a bad day! (You can level these fluctuations by getting traffic to your site in other ways, by the way, through PPC advertising, for instance, or affiliate marketing.)

When you drop in the rank, it’s tempting to blame yourself (or your SEO consultant); you figure that whatever you last did to the site, that’s what caused the problem. But it’s very hard to correlate any particular action with a particular increase or decrease in search engine rank. Often when a rank drops, it’s because of something that Google has done, not anything you’ve done. Perhaps Google decides that a certain type of link — reciprocal or paid links (see Chapter 17) — should no longer be of much value. Or perhaps it gives more weight to a particular page tag, or to another form of link. You may have changed something completely different, see your site drop, assume it’s because of the action you took, and be totally unaware of the real cause of the drop. In the preceding example, my client decided that he was being punished for creating links in Craigslist.com back to his site — then, later, being punished for not creating links in Craigslist.

Sometimes you just have to wait and let the situation settle down and keep on keeping on! Keep on creating well-optimized content, and keep on creating links (and various, different types of links) back to your site. This stuff really does work; you just have to work at it.

On the other hand, it is possible to get on the wrong side of the search engines; perhaps you have done something that the search engines object to. That’s a subject you can find out about in Chapter 20.

This chapter provides an overview of the search engine battle you’re about to join. It’s time to jump in and make it all happen, so Chapter 5 explains what search engines really like to see: Web sites that people on the Internet believe are really useful.