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There Are No ShortcutsThat's not true, of course – in fact there are any number of shortcuts, many of which you will see in use by your competitors today... but you probably won't see them tomorrow, or next week, or however long it takes the search engines to catch up. Because they will catch up – they are all constantly improving their programs (the 'algorithms' that drive results rankings) to weed out any factors that might affect the accuracy, relevancy and usefulness of their results for users. What I mean is that there are no shortcuts for long-term success – if you want to appear at the top of the results for a query, your site simply has to be the most relevant and useful site in the search engine's index. It can't just look like the best site – it has to actually be the best, otherwise user behaviour (eg clicking back to the search engine and searching again, or clicking on another listing) and link data (other sites that link to yours) will indicate that it isn't, and the search engine will recalculate its relevance assessment accordingly. For this reason my approach to search engine marketing often takes in more than simply making a website search-engine-friendly, or optimising the performance of a pay-per-click campaign – I want to assess how a site measures up in comparison to its competitors and whether there are any significant areas of opportunity, so that I can agree realistic targets and expectations with a client, given the site or business's position in the market. If you want to be number one in Google for a particular query, I'll advise on how you can achieve it – if it's a small market niche or a highly-targeted keyphrase you might only need some page optimisation for maximum search-engine-friendliness, but if it's a generic term or a commercially valuable market you may need a complex strategy for ongoing link development, content creation, and social networking. What you won't have to worry about, however, is losing your rankings once you've gained them. Your competitors may be using techniques to make their sites appear more relevant than they actually are, but they will have to keep updating their techniques to stay ahead as the engines catch up to them – whereas your sites will actually be relevant, and are therefore likely to be unaffected by any algorithm updates. This used to be termed 'ethical' marketing, because it's an approach that complies with the search engines' stated guidelines rather than attempts to deceive them – but in fact it's just common business sense. It makes sense to make your website the best it can be, because then it's going to perform well. It makes sense to make it search-engine-friendly, because then your customers can find it. And it makes sense to do it right the first time round, because you don't want to have to keep doing it every time the search engines update their algorithm.
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SEM EXPLAINEDNo Shortcuts!
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