Myths about SEO

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Absolute Top Five Search Engine Marketing Myths 
Uncovered!
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by
Lee Traupel
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It’s no secret that Search Engine marketing can drive
significant amounts of very qualified traffic to a web
site ­ as 85% of Internet users utilize search engines
to find/research for goods and services. The problem
for many companies is the difficulty they face sifting
through conflicting information and hyperbole! Here is
my top five list of myths that need to be run to
ground.

Big Picture Myth One ­ Search engine ranking leads are
not as good as those which originate from traditional
marketing vehicles (print, direct mail, PR, etc.) ­
this is absolute hogwash, the truth is many agencies
don’t have a clue about s/e ranking, so they push their
clients to ignore this form of advertising. They simply
don’t want to recommend anything they don’t understand
and/or utilize an interactive marketing vehicle that
requires a blend of very specialized technology and
processes.

We’ve in fact found just the opposite when we’ve
analyzed s/e traffic versus other types of leads for
our clients; i.e. search engine traffic can be much
better, as it is comprised of individuals who are
actively seeking info, not just people whose curiosity
has been piqued by an eye-catching publication ad or
press release. And, when we’ve analyzed the data by
tracking leads via a landing page (on a web site) we’ve
discovered that CPL (cost per lead) numbers can be much
lower for s/e ranking than other more traditional
marketing methods.

Big Picture Myth Two ­ Effective s/e marketing can be
done in house ­ this is rarely the case, the sheer
complexity and online competition (digital warfare!)
for rankings makes this extremely difficult for most
companies. Based upon our analysis over 73% of
corporate accounts don’t understand the basic
fundamentals; i.e. how to properly use keywords, meta
tags and titles and worse, don’t submit their web sites
to top tier Directories (Yahoo, LookSmart, OPD) and the
hundreds of second tier directories.

Most companies delegate the s/e submissions to the
webmaster or web site development staff and they just
don’t have the time to understand the daunting
complexities required to generate page 1-3 rankings -
or to stay abreast of the shifting submissions and
ranking criteria standards, as modified monthly by top
tier search engines. And, in many companies the s/e
ranking is added to the over worked webmaster’s tasks
purely as an afterthought ­ as opposed to being
addressed formally by the marketing department, with
dedicated personnel and a budget.

Big Picture Myth Three ­ off the shelf software that
submits a site to thousands of web sites and presents
snazzy reports can do it all. This is so inaccurate and
nothing can be further from the truth ­ it takes a
tremendous amount of labor and time to identify keyword
sets (not just words), optimize the content for these
keywords, submit the pages while obeying the rules of
the road and then continually analyzing rankings and
tweaking to maintain and drive rankings (web site
visibility).

Software can certainly help to automate some facets of
the process and be used for back end analysis ­ but you
can’t expect any application to make the job easy,
there is too much inherent complexity in the processes.
And, competition for keyword sets is fierce ­ as there
are an estimated 5-10M registered domains (the numbers
vary widely) with 60K new domains being registered
every day.

Big Picture Myths Four and Five  ­ Any page listing
will help to drive traffic to a web site ­ this is
another misconception. If you are aren’t achieving page
1-3 rankings then your wasting a great deal of time and
resources ­ most people never drill down below these
pages. Another common mistake is trying to achieve s/e
rankings for a specific URL or product ­ if people know
the name of a company or product they will find your
web site easily, it’s a waste of resources to optimize
for these specialized terms in 80% of most cases.

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Lee Traupel has 20 plus years of marketing experience.
He is the co-founder of a Northern California and
Brussels (Belgium) based, privately held, Marketing
Services and Software Company,
Intelective Communications, Inc.
< http://www.intelective.com >
Intelective focuses exclusively on providing services
to small to medium sized companies that need strategic
and tactical marketing services. He can be reached at:
Lee@intelective.com
(c) copyright 2001 by intelective.com
Downloaded at: < http://fantomaster.com/ >
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