I’ve performed a few Internet Marketing presentations for local business organizations recently. While I went into them with a bit of trepidation (public speaking is not on MY top ten list), they turned out to be great experiences: the more the audience responds to whats being presented, the more fun it is! There were lots of nodding heads at the presentations.
The main content of the presentation is a list of my Top 10 Search Optimization Tips. The tips are geared towards both people who manage their own search programs AND people who have their search programs managed for them. Since people seem to get so much out of the presentations, I thought I would post the list here. Without further ado: (Oh Yeah, real quick, while I speak of Google in my presentations, the same thoughts can be utilized for Yahoo and (what is now) Bing) NOW, without any further ado:
Top 10 Search Tips – Tip #1 – Patience
My first tip, Patience, speaks to the fact that, although you have done all the right things to make the search engines happy and should be receiving top-of-first-page results in response to your perfect search efforts, search engines take more into account than just a perfectly-tuned website. Nothing happens instantaneously on search engines (except payments, of course) RELEVANCE plays a huge role in search results and, to an extent, the tenure of a website is factored into it’s relevance. This doesn’t mean that new websites can’t rank as well as old websites, it means that a site needs to “season” a little before results start to appear. When speaking of Google, it’s called the “sandbox”: a site, after being newly created or undergoing a major change, sits in a sandbox for a while (up to 2 months?) before real results start to appear.
Again, relevance: just because a brand new site is set up perfectly doesn’t mean it’s relevant. People get caught up in programmatic response – the idea that since Search is an application or program, results should happen instantaneously as a result of the input. Google’s algorithms take into account longevity as a factor of relevance – and not just “time online”. Good activity, ongoing site improvements, backward links (factoring Page Rank) and patience are all required to make for good search results. A lot of frustration on the part of search program managers (and clients) can be thwarted if patience is taken into account. It’s difficult to wait – and some people even think it’s not true, even after it’s proven!
Tags: Search Marketing, Search Marketing Activity, Top Ten Search Marketing Tips