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Search Engine Optimization And The Magic Fairy Dust
By Bill Platt (c) 2007

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. When a new website moves into
the top ten, another must be removed.

For any given search term at any given time, there are only ten
web pages on page one of the search results, and there are
millions of web pages that did not make page one, who 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 their 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 that you must
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 that they can give their users the right web page for
     the right 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 the process of 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 his or her
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 the alternate problem. They
consistently convert a significant number of visitors to buyers,
but 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 the search engine companies, there are more than
one thousand calculations that determine how well a website will
rank in their search engine result pages (SERPs).

The Google engineers are fond of saying that if you build your
website for human beings instead of search engines, then 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.

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

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

Major subsections of the story have their own 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 who is flipping through the pages of a magazine can
quickly assess the story content and make the decision as to
whether they want to read the full story.

In the most simplistic way, this is how the search engines
analyze a website's content to decide which web page will best
serve their 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.

I have heard 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 tend to
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.
(www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html) Links to this
web page: according to Google (31); according to Yahoo (nearly
12 million); according to MSN (6,400).

# Yahoo's #2 result - Google PageRank 10.
(www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer) Links to this web page:
Google (15,200); Yahoo (700 thousand); MSN (32).

# MSN's #1 result - Google PageRank 8.
(www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash)
Links to this web page: Google (0); Yahoo (2.9 million);
MSN (778).

On Google's top result, they show 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
links, 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 strong link count, but 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, for me it really is no surprise that we cannot see all
of the links that point to Adobe pages, or to the links we have
created that point to our clients and ourselves, by querying the
search engines.

Also, the sheer numbers of inbound links do not rule the roost.
Google's #1 result (PR8) is actually 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 a SEO "professional" told me
that be believed my link building system was a sham.

I showed him that on the top 51 keyword phrases we use to market
our original commercial website, we had 11 number one results,
31 top five results, 34 top ten results, 47 top thirty results,
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.

Ole boy tore up Google trying to track how it was possible for
me to have accomplished what I claimed. He finally concluded
that since Google would not show HIM how I was able to rank so
well in their search engine results, that I must have been
lying.

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,
then I could not have accomplished such results by the methods I
claimed.

Okay, I admit it.

I used the exact same method that Adobe used 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 altogether and instead run over to the corner store to
get your own magic fairy dust. You might have to shop around a
bit, but it is out there.
================================================================
Bill Platt has been involved with link building
(http://www.linksandtraffic.com/seo-services/link-building.html)
since 1999 for his own promotion and for search engine marketing
purposes, and he has been doing it professionally for clients
since 2001. Visit http://www.LinksAndTraffic.com to learn more.
If you would like to talk to Bill in person, he can be reached
at (405) 780-7745 between 9am and 6pm CST, Monday through Friday.
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