More antiquated web marketing:
2004 search engine strategies
deliver page-one results in 2008
A while ago, in Are You Using Old School Marketing?, you read about Jay Conrad Levinson, outrageously famous for his Guerilla Marketing brand, and his 1996 book, Guerilla Marketing Online Weapons. In it, he lists and explains how to use 100 free or low-cost tools, listed under categories such as:
- service
- customer comfort
- goodwill
- coupons and samples
- intelligence gathering, and
- attitude
Today, I dug into my computer’s PDF library and nearly choked on the layers of virtual dust when I pulled out another ancient decomposing document, The Web Marketing Checklist, this time authored by Ralph F. Wilson in a 2005 update of his 1997 original checklist.
Just like Levinson’s categories that have been fundamental to businesses before dramatic technological and communication revolutions such the telephone, telegraph, Pony Express, or even the 1847 postal service system, Wilson’s categories and the specifics within them are fundamental to your online presence, and must come before adding on bells and whistles. Put another way, if your car engine needs a serious overhaul, your twitter and facebook fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror won’t do much for you.
Wilson lists 31 strategies under:
- search engine strategies (now known as search engine optimization, or SEO)
- linking strategies
- traditional strategies (which overlap with Levinson’s guerilla marketing)
- email strategies
- paid advertising strategies
- and miscellaneous strategies
From the table of contents, Wilson lists these under “Search Engine Strategies:”
- Write a page title
- Write a description meta tag
- Include your keywords in header tags H1, H2, H3
- Make sure your keywords are in the first paragraph of your body text
- Use keywords in hyperlinks
- Make your navigation system search engine friendly
- Develop several pages focused on particular keywords
- Submit your webpage URL to search engines
- Fine-tune with search engine positioning
Do these still work? Let me give you the following timeline facts from my own October 2008 experience and you make up your mind:
One-page website #1:
- Day 1: bought domain name based on my top keyword
- Day 2: wrote one-page website with keywords in the page title (Wilson #1), description (#2), and throughout the page itself (#4 and #7), including the “buy now” link (#5)
- Days 5-9: created digital product to sell.
- Day 9: bought hosting and went live.
- Day 10: submitted to 3 directories (Wilson #8)
- Day 14: sale #1
- Day 27: page 1 search ranking for my top 2 keywords in Yahoo (#9 and #10 ranking) and MSN (#1 and #3 ranking).
One-page website #2:
- Day 1: bought domain name based on my top keyword
- Day 2: wrote one-page website with keywords in the page title (Wilson #1), description (#2), and throughout the page itself (#4 and #7), including the “buy now” link (#5)
- Days 5-9: created digital product to sell.
- Day 10: bought hosting and went live.
- Day 10: submitted to 3 directories (Wilson #8)
- Day 22: page 1 search ranking for my #2 keyword in Google (#6 and #7 ranking)
- Day 24: page 1 search ranking for my #1 keyword in Google (#9 and #10 ranking)
- Day 28: sale #1
In short, by using six of Wilson’s nine fundamental and time-tested search engine strategies (none of which cost a single thin dime), I got onto the search engine’s first page of results in 22 to 27 days.
So you know I’m not pulling any funny business, I admit I also ran pay-per-click ads and created incoming links from high-traffic sites (both of which Wilson lists later in his document as strategies).
With a Page 1 search ranking, your pay-per-click ads can have greater impact, since:
- they get multiple exposures from organic search and paid search results on the same page; and,
- the ads and the organic listing reinforce each other and build credibility and authority, in the same way that running ads next to (or even sponsoring) editorial content involving your product reinforce each other.
So what do you think? Have you had a similar experience with your website(s)? What tricks or techniques did you find worked well for you? Or, have you felt stymied in the process of getting your website from being parked at the idea stage to blasting off the launch pad? If so, what part or parts do you think are holding you back? Where can you use help? Add your comment below now:
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
It feels rather validating to have an “expert’s” list iterating the things that have been done in the due course of following a search engine “philosophy.” After talking with some engineers who had worked to design search engine algorithms back around the turn of the century (isn’t that cool that we get to say that to our grandkids?!) they indicated that the Holy Grail for them was bypassing all the “tricks” anyone could try, and deliver the best actual search results to the user.
Philosophically, it all comes down to congruence and integrity. If you say you’re going to talk about something, talk about that something. Congruence of subject, content, links, navigation, etc. Everything that you would use if you were actually the right/relevant place to go, had the right/relevant thing to say, and are in fact delivering on the promise. Incoming links, reinforcing your knowledge of the relevant subject (as attested to by others) are the icing/capper on SEO here. Relevancy is what search engines are trying to deliver in terms of results.
On the other side, they actually strive to identify “tricks,” and “blacklist” accordingly. (Hidden tags, incongruencies - or all out b.s.) The guys who charge big bucks for SEO, and go at it from a “tag-stuffing” perspective, hate people using an organic approach with congruency and integrity, because there’s no way to “fool” your way to the top.
SE algorithm design is one field actively striving to create a meritocracy: may the most relevant site win.