The Life of a Rank Checker
Posted by: James Lewitzke in General Search Engine Talk, GoogleSo many people check their ranking spots on Google and pray for their webpage to be in the number one spot for a specific query.
Why are Search Engines a bad source of traffic to Market for?
This is the average reaction from a rank checker:
Rankings fluctuate, thus rendering rank checking a useless practice. Besides, they don’t always mean targeted traffic and conversion rates (which are (or should be) the most common goals for commercialized websites).
Google uses many datacenters to return search results to end users. Plus, Google’s (along with every other major Search Engine’s) algorithm is ever-changing, so, factors level themselves out. For example, one day, Google may place a heavy importance on the date the post was created, then the next day, word count becomes a major factor. It’s impossible to tell what portion gives weight in accordance to others. So then you’ll ask something like this:
BUUT James, How else AM I suppozed too Get Traffic LOL?!?!
Pretend that the Search Engines do NOT exist!
Don’t believe me? Just imagine for a moment Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, or all the other search engines have never existed. Pretend that it is 1993, the web is just beginning to explode on the internet. Many possibilities await you (Not to mention all the tools you have at your disposal in the present). Some immediate examples include:
- Community Partaking = Some places, such as discussion forums, allow you to interact with similar-minded people. If you constantly give worthy advice, people will want to hear what you have to say (on your own site).
- Word-of-Mouth = If you have something interesting, why not let others do the marketing for you?
- Direct Traffic = If you have a good website, and people have already seen it once, chances are they’ll bookmark it and return to read or interact with it again and again.
This is the mind set you have to have if you want to market your website properly.
James good to see you posting again.
I asked a question a year or so ago about what you would do if SEs did not exist.
Since I know you fairly well I think I understand where your coming from.
The truth is if SEs did not exist all of us would be doing things that could possibly get us banned today to get traffic.
SEs do exist. So webmasters have to take that into consideration.
I think the point of your article is that web masters should concentrate on user experience. I think your right.
Hey Connie, how’s it going?
I didn’t know about the question you asked about SE’s existence, was it an old Spam-Whackers post?
Of course Search Engine’s do exist, and it’s always nice to receive traffic from them, but what I’m discussing in the article here is from a purely marketing standpoint. The list of alternatives I made was just off the top of my head, I know there’s more methods that could be added to it.
I think you were mostly right about the point I was making. Users are the people who actually look for information, and come back for more if it was that good. Search Engines don’t provide a useful long-term traffic plan IMO (as they could take away hundreds or thousands of readers with only a slight modification to the algorithm, plus all the SEM would have been for nothing).
I wonder though, what other “tactics” would most webmasters use that cause them to get banned from the SE’s? (If the Engines didn’t exist, that is.)
The levels of spam (splogs, content scraping, etc.) would probably drop dramatically too if they weren’t around; and marketing wannabes would resort to more primitive tactics to advertise, like email and community spamming.