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Getting top search engine listing is perhaps one of the hottest
subjects in the internet marketing world. The problem is that many
discussions on this subject are based on speculation. Almost no one
knows the exact algorithms of the search engines. And what make it
worse is that the search engines have a habit of changing their
algorithms. However, some people are so obsessed with top search
engine listing that they tend to undermine the importance of other web
traffic generation techniques. These "trances" are partly caused by
some misleading myths that surround the search engine marketing
subject. Below are two of those myths with some empirical facts that
contradict and refute them. Myth #1: "You can't get loads of targeted traffic without the top search engine listing." This
is completely wrong. Jack Humphrey, the power linking guy, has given us
a picture that it is possible to get huge amount of targeted traffic
without the top search engine listing. In his Special Report, "What if
Google Didn't Exist?," he shared one of his sites' stat in April 2004
and guess what? From 71,444 unique visitors that he got at that month,
"google search" referred only a small portion of them, i.e. 0.07%. You can read Jack's complete report at http://www.webmastertraffictools.com/weblog/index.php/weblog/googleexist/. I
also found another similar fact from Tinu Abayomi-Paul, the free
traffic chick. In her blog post, "Site Promotion is Multi-Faceted," she
said that the search engines only constitute 6 - 10% of her traffic in
any given month. While she didn't tell us about the monthly amount of
traffic to her website, I believe that her site gets huge traffic every
month, because she has an Alexa ranking of 45,739 (that's what my Alexa
toolbar showed me the last time I checked her site). You can read Tinu's complete blog post at http://www.freetraffictip.com/2005/06/site-promotion-is-multi-faceted.php. Myth #2: "The major search engines are reliable sources of sustainable, residual, traffic." This
is also inaccurate. Look at what happened to Alice Seba from Internet
Based Moms. One of her websites, http://malcolmsweb.com, was banned by
Google, even though that website was full with good content. Since May
21, 2005, her visitors instantly dropped from about 700-800 per day to
200-250 per day. You can read Alice's complete story at her blog
post, 'Alice "White Hat" Seba Has Been Banned,' at
http://www.aliceseba.com/2005/06/alice-white-hat-seba-has-been-banned.html. Now
I don't mean to undermine the importance of the major search engines.
The major search engines are one of the biggest sources of targeted
traffic on the net and so, you should do proper optimization and try to
get top search engine listing. But, don't let yourself be misled
by these myths and ignore many other web traffic generation techniques.
With the unstable nature of the search engines, it would be wise to use
the search engines only as one of your traffic sources and look for
other traffic generation techniques to build multiple sources of
traffic.
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