Working the System

On its face, it’s a great system. Airlines offer cheap fares, and bargain travel sites list all the lowest fares in one place. Sure, travelers know they won’t get awesome amenities or the best travel times, but they will get a great deal. The sites spend a fortune on advertising (anyone seen a roaming gnome — or William Shatner — lately?) and the airlines fill their flights. Everyone benefits.

The rub is that airlines figured out they could get in front of people by giving the impression that their fees were the lowest. When airlines posted low fares, the extremely popular price-based sites would award them top rankings. But when travelers actually booked their flights, they found their fares to be bogged down with fees. In the end, travelers who’d sacrificed other preferences for a bargain ended up with flights that proved as expensive as standard ones.

A Problem of Relevance

It’s taken a while, but just as search engines catch on to websites’ shady practices, authorities are taking notice of the airlines’ tricks. And they’re coming in to impose new guidelines. The problem is, customers aren’t happy. The purpose of bargain travel sites is to offer value — and when their flights don’t offer that, those sites and their offerings become irrelevant. With valuable reputations to protect, the sites can’t afford to mess around.

The same is true of search engines. When site owners or black-hat SEOs use tricks to rank highly, the relevance of search results drops. A good example of this is those all-advertising sites that come up for popular keywords — very common with celebrity names. The sites are chock full of spam, links, and ads, but they’re useless to a searcher who’s actually looking for information. A site with faked relevance wastes the visitor’s time and depletes the search engine’s credibility.

Just as travelers are getting wise to these airline tactics, web searchers are getting more savvy. If you’ve got a spammy site, you’d better believe your days at the top of the rankings are numbered. Refocus your efforts at building genuine relevance, and you can rest easy knowing the best results will (eventually) rise to the top.

Communication

Ask any couple who has a sturdy marriage why they’ve been able to make it work, and almost all of them will list good communication as one item that’s made their marriage last.  But everyone communicates differently, so how do two people who have entirely different communication styles get married and make it last?  By learning HOW to communicate with each other.  It’s a similar story in SEO.  There are two parties — a website and the search engine (let’s say Google).  To have a successful SEO campaign, the website should communicate in Google’s language to signal its relevance on the web.  The way a website signals its relevance to Google can be done in a lot of different ways, but white hat SEO is one of those methods.  Websites that communicate poorly with Google are like couples that communicate poorly with each other — sometimes they break up (in Google’s case, it just kicks the website to the curb).  However, having a strong SEO strategy will help a website communicate in a positive way with Google.

Balance

Compromise is a part of any relationship.  Sometimes you want Chinese food and she wants Italian; sometimes he wants to spend Christmas with his family and you want to spend Christmas with yours.  It’s a balancing act, and it’s the same with SEO.  Google’s ranking system is very advanced – it takes content relevance AND SEO elements into account when ranking websites.   A solid online marketing strategy includes a balance of SEO elements that search engines like AND content that human visitors will read and act upon.

Investment

Time is a major investment in a marriage.  Time to get to know your spouse; time spent with your family; time to talk; time to decompress and remember why you love your partner.  A happy marriage does not happen overnight.  SEO also involves investments: time and money.  SEO is an online marketing strategy that does take time to work.  A definite time frame in which to expect conversions during an SEO project is difficult to estimate.  It could take 3, 6 or 12 months (or more).  The most important point here is to commit to the SEO project and give it time to work, because conversions (phone calls, inquiries, etc.) do not happen overnight.

SEO can also include an investment of money, depending on how you plan on implementing the project.  Hiring an SEO expert does require a money investment, but it can often reduce the amount of time it takes to get conversions.  Hiring an SEO company can also reduce the time you spend working it on it yourself.

Continued Maintenance

A marriage requires continued maintenance to give it a better likelihood of working over the long term.  Getting married is fun, but happy couples work to maintain that happiness.  There are ups and downs and major life changes (like having kids), but maintaining a consistent and happy marriage requires much more than one stop at the altar to say some vows.   To protect the time you’ve invested in your marriage, regular maintenance is important.

In the SEO world, continued maintenance helps the project work over a longer period of time than a project without continued monitoring and maintenance.  Search engines change every day; competition changes every day; marketing changes often — you get the picture.  Continued SEO maintenance helps to protect the time and money you’ve already invested in your SEO project.

It is worth noting the author of this post is not a marriage counselor or therapist, just a married person!

Investment

To begin saving for retirement, you invest money into a retirement account.  If you want a larger return, you invest a larger amount of money.  However, a little bit goes a long way AND is better than nothing.  You should also have a plan to invest on a regular basis (usually monthly or with each pay check).  It’s the same with SEO.  You can invest a small amount of resources (time, money, etc.) and get results.  It will take longer to earn those results, but you’ll get there.  If you can invest more resources into your SEO, your returns are larger and faster.

Approach

When you embark on SEO, it’s important to consider whether to adopt an aggressive or a conservative approach. In both saving and SEO, a conservative approach is more secure but is likely to take longer to show significant results. An aggressive approach can achieve big returns in a short time but involves a greater degree of risk.

When it comes to optimization, white-hat SEO can be viewed as the conservative approach. This involves tried-and-true techniques that build and showcase genuine relevance. The aggressive approach involves tricking the search engines rather than building the relevance of your website. The risks include not only losing money spent on SEO, but having your website banned by search engines.

Consistency

SEO, just like saving for retirement, requires a consistent plan for investment to achieve maximum results.  Just like financial markets, the online marketplace is constantly changing. In the end, SEO is an ongoing battle to convince the search engines that your website is more valuable/important/reliable than all the others. Since the factors used to determine relevance change regularly and new sites are added to and deleted from indexes every day,    SEO specialists recommend a monthly maintenance plan for most SEO campaigns.

Expertise

Hiring a financial planning professional can help you get the most out of your retirement portfolio. Some of the same benefits can be gained by hiring an online marketing professional to manage your SEO campaign. You can, of course, learn to manage either of these tasks yourself. But financial planners understand how to grow your retirement savings because of their experience and they usually provide better results than self-managed accounts. SEO experts specialize in promoting online visibility, are constantly aware of evolving online trends, and can simply liberate you from concerns about your online presence.

No Guarantees

Both financial planners and SEO specialists work in your best interest, apply their expertise, and strive to maximize your resources. Neither, however, can guarantee specific results. Despite the best planning and action, stocks and search engine rankings can both skyrocket or plummet unexpectedly. That’s one reason elements of your online presence should as diversified as elements of your financial resources.  If an SEO specialist guarantees results, you’re probably dealing with a black-hat or deceptive service provider. Unless you’re interested in an aggressive and risky approach, it’s best to run the other way.