Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [44]
Register your domain for a few years—whatever you think will make sense and as long as you are willing to invest in it.
No wonder the Internet is such a mystery and business owners make what they think are good decisions based on advice, only to have zero results. With this kind of advice, the absence of a result would be preferable to the hundreds of lost hours and ill-spent money. The basis of website visibility in the search engines is your programming, site structure, content, and incoming links. Those are the fundamental principles of building a website marketing strategy. Everything else supports these principles.
A Short History of the SEO Industry
The seemingly conflicting nature of SEO information is based on the backgrounds of those who formed the early years of the thought and practices of this fledgling business. The search engine optimization industry was born out of two very different areas; there are those who learned SEO contextually from a marketing background, and there are those who learned it mechanically from a technical background.
Those with a technical background were able to reverse engineer search engine–ranking algorithms within days of a new update. By finding out the weight given to certain on-page and off-page factors, the methods to “game” the search engines spread very quickly online. Within weeks, most SEO specialists were aware of the changes in the algorithm and how to change their websites accordingly to gain rankings.
A little more quietly, marketers learned SEO as a persuasive skill in writing and developing content that resulted in rankings, and SEO copywriting became one of the earliest areas of focus in the industry. Coupled with technical knowledge and resources, many small businesses that retained SEO specialists and larger businesses that had people learning SEO while on the job were successful in gaining immediate results in the search market.
The early days of SEO (1995–1999) saw innovation and tactics driven primarily by the technical side of the industry. Search engine submission software, doorway pages (pages that are developed for search engines to find and rank but not for people to see), keyword density, IP detection (another way of showing search engines content-filled pages, but users do not see), and many more tactics were designed to fool the search engines and inflate relevance. As search engines improved to the point of spidering pages and refining algorithms, fooling them became much more difficult, and it became something that only a gifted few did very well.
Three Factors in SEO Information
Remember that no SEO expert with more than 10 years of experience has learned their practices in a school or from a book. There are no degree programs or schools for the first few generations of SEO practitioners, because everything was learned through testing, trial, and error. This brings us to why searches for SEO advice yield odd and usually contradictory advice. There are three main factors, explored in the following sections.
Factor 1: Experience as the Teacher
Every top-level SEO specialist has learned their trade through countless hours and late nights of personal and client work. In turn, SEO specialists who learned from the first generation of SEO authorities learned the style and philosophy of their teachers and then refined it with their personal experiences.
As a result, there are many “flavors” of SEO information and specialties. There are SEO specialists who have a strong technical and programming background who think nothing of developing scripts that will provide a mechanical answer to a problem with a website. There are SEO specialists who came from a marketing or copywriting background who look to