What The Search Engines REALLY Want

One more article from Chris Malta's blog.....quite interesting I thought...so here it is....copied straight from Chris's blog.  I actually got an email from him about this subject, so I went to his blog and read it.  He has some very good content for sure.....his company is Drop Ship network....doba.com is another drop ship network.

In the dim recesses of internet history (about 5 years ago) the way to get the all-important internet search engines to find your web site used to be all about on-page optimization.

That meant that the more times your site pages repeated certain words that people searched on to find your products, the higher you rose in the search engines.

However, like everything else on God’s green earth, all the mental midgets out there who would rather cheat than work spoiled all that for us.

They started stuffing unrelated, but popular ‘keywords’ into their web pages in order to bring people to their web sites.

Someone would search on ‘DVD player’ (a very popular ‘keyword’) and end up on a web site that sold bowling balls.

Because the owner of the bowling ball site had stuffed the keyword ‘DVD player’ into their bowling ball site so many times, trying to being in visitors that really didn’t belong there in hopes of making a sale.

The search engines figured this out and decided that on-page optimization was only going to be a small part of the way they ranked web sites.

Instead, they turned to inbound links to give sites authority in their search rankings.

While on-page optimization is still important, inbound links are now more important.

What’s an inbound link?

It’s another web page somewhere online that talks about a subject, and links to your web site as an authority on that subject.

I’ve been a musician for nearly 40 years, since I was a kid. If I’m at a party playing my guitar, and somebody walks in the door and asks if anyone knows how to tune a guitar, everybody in the room is going to point to me, right?

I’m right there playing the guitar and I obviously know how to tune one. Those people pointing to me are my ‘inbound links’. They’re giving me the ‘authority’ in the room for being the one who can answer that person’s question or solve their problem.

So, the search engines turned to counting inbound links to a web site in order to decide how much authority it had for its subject.

Once again, though, the mental midgets outnumbered the real businesspeople, and created ‘link farms’.

These are places where you can pay by the month to have them point thousands of links to your web site. Unfortunately, the vast majority of those links were (once again) completely unrelated to what your web site was about.

The search engines figured this out too, and decided that link farms were a no-no.

What to do now?

Well, the mental midgets are still trying to come up with flavor-of-the-week tricks to beat the search engines, and they’re still out there trying to sell those secret tips and tricks (that will only work for a couple of months or so) for outrageous amounts of money.

On the other hand, people who understand that you actually have to do the work when you’re in business, and that shortcuts and tricks are not the basis of a real business, are simply doing things the right way.

What’s the right way?

Create real inbound links to your web site. It’s that simple.

The search engines are like newspapers. They need a constant fresh supply of new information in order to keep people coming back to them. They need to keep people coming back to them so they can sell advertising, which is how they make their money, just like newspapers do.

The best way to get the search engines to ‘feature your story’ in their ‘newspaper’ is to simply give them what they want, instead of constantly trying to fool them.

The best way to create inbound links for your web site is to write a blog, write articles for EZines, and use social marketing tools like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and so on.

Whenever you use these social marketing tools, you’re creating content-rich pages online that link back to your web site, and you’re raising yourself higher in the Search Engines because you’re building real, authoritative inbound links back to your site, just like the Search Engines want you to do.

If you really want to be successful in business, there’s no substitute for doing things the right way.

Trying to trick your way into high search engine rankings is only going to work for a short period of time if it works at all, then the search engines are going to figure you out and banish you to never-never land, where your site will never be seen again.

So do it right with social marketing, and let the mental midgets fall by the wayside as you climb the rankings to real Ebiz success.

Kind of long ... but pretty good.....hope you like his post too....leave a comment if you have a moment...many thanks....Phil