The high Cost of Lost Opportunity

As the search engine industry matures and continues to get more complex, we find SEO practitioners that are unable to keep up with the technology and stay ahead of the learning curve. This has divided the industry into 5 basic groups.

MetaFirst there is the group that still preaches Meta tags are the Holy Grail and that you can achieve top search engine results page listings simply by adding Metatags to any site and submitting it to hundreds or thousands of search engines. Many of these companies are sole practitioners who have created a site to sell the submission service and have a script for search engine submission.

The second group is of the belief that if you do your keyword research properly and understand what your customers are looking for you can write your site copy to exactly meet the customers needs and what they are looking for. The concept is that if the content is right people will link to the site and you will get found. There are cases where this has worked very well. The key is to impress the right people initially so they will spread the word. Most businesses don’t have the luxury of this type of patience.

Third is the group that says put up any old web site and get links to point to it.  The concept is to get as many links as possible and to control the “theme” of the link with the anchor text - the clickable text link on the page that points back to the site. Back in the day (circa 2005) this strategy worked and was called Google bombing. At that time entering the search term “miserable failure” in Google would produce the White House official site for George W. Bush. There is a very high number of offshore companies doing this today.

Fourth, you find companies that may have success in search optimization for companies that have sites already built correctly and have been online for some time. Much of the success of these companies comes from better distribution of the correct keywords through the site. These companies offer a choice of packages, “Silver, Gold and Platinum” that are relatively affordable because of the one size fits all approach. In most cases, packages come with an initial set up fee and an ongoing “tweaking fee” every month.

The fifth group is made up of experts who take the time and the effort to test and analyze a web site to see exactly what restricts it from getting found in the search engines. For example, many content management systems are structured in a manner that does not allow the search engines to index the pages of the site. Once a SEO needs analysis diagnosis is made, they lay out a clear best practices plan to optimize the site including issues with servers, site structure, content, linking, and reputation management. At this level, the analysis of visitor behavior, tracking listings in the search engine results pages and pay-per-click management is usually offered. Some are taking the process to the next level adding full services such as lead management and conversion tracking.

Like everything else in life, there is a price to pay. Some may think that the business they are involved with only merits a $20 investment to get submitted to the engines and others will understand that the true cost is not in the optimization investment but is in the cost of lost opportunity when the site is not being found by the people who are looking for it.

The author, Terry Mickelson is the founder of Page Views, Inc. an Arizona based Search Engine Optimization firm. PageViews specializes in affordable custom business to business search optimization and search marketing campaigns. Terry can be reached at 480-556-9752 http://www.pageviews.com