In theory you earn traffic as a result of a good ranking in search engines.

This is the way most people think they know how to get visitor traffic to their website. They know that they need to get in the search engines & they know that they need to get to the top of the search engines. But they don’t know how!

Once upon a time all you had to do was get a few pages of half decent information, tweak a few meta tags, put in a good title and headline and submit your website and wait. Sooner or later you would end up listed in Alta Vista, or Yahoo or the “newcomer”, Google. With very little competition your website would soon float up the charts.

But that was way back then, and this is right here and now - and things are just a little bit different!

First off, Google became the dominant force in search engines, so it became important to focus on optimising your website for Google.

Next, along came the competition and some of them did a better job of making their websites “search engine friendly”.

Then along came the “Black Hat” marketers, the “Let’s Fool Google” Gurus who came up with lots of tricks to “SPAM” their websites into the top ranks of search results. So Google hit back with anti-spam algorithms (techie speak for bits of their search program). Unfortunately this was just as the ordinary web marketer was starting to copy the “Black Hat Gang”.

A couple of years later the rules changed dramatically. Now it wasn’t enough to have a good website, well optimised with interesting & relevant content. Nope! Now you had to have links - and lots of them. The theory being that a link from another website was a “vote” for your website. More links = more votes, simple really!

Not surprisingly by this time Search Engine Marketing was becoming a game where more effort was going into cheating and trickery than was going in to earning a place at the top by providing the kind of quality information that search engine customers were looking for. Web rings and link farms proliferated (automated linking programs which would link members’ websites together), reciprocal linking became fashionable with webmasters continually “pestering” other webmasters to exchange links - and so on.

Google soon hit back against the spammers and tightened up their “rules” on linking to focus on quality above quantity. But the spammers keep on trying to stay ahead!

Worst of all, these smart guys were selling their services to unsuspecting website owners which simply made matters worse. And it’s still going on, whenever a legitimate way of improving a website ranking is discovered, someone will find a way to cheat the system and then sell their “solution” to others.

  • Gateway and doorway pages
  • Showing different pages to humans and search robots  
  • Automated blog submitters
  • Automatic article compilers
  • Blog comment spamming

To name but a few! They are even trying to saturate MySpace and YouTube with their automated drivel.

So what hope is there for the ordinary honest web marketer who is just trying to provide a service to their customers? Well, stick around and I shall try to provide you with the necessary “clues” in coming articles.