Traffic Building

Good search engine rankings have long been the preferred source for generating free website traffic. In fact, many search engine optimization companies concentrate solely on achieving high rankings in search engines as the be-all end-all to successful online marketing.

But, recent articles in Network World and the Wall Street Journal highlight the need to diversify your marketing efforts so as not to be overly reliant on search engines for traffic.

In short, Google is using automated techniques to flag websites in its rankings that may potentially infect web surfers with malware. If Google flags your site (and they’re being cryptic about the criteria for this flag), potential visitors will be warned that your site will potentially infect their computer and they’ll be required to manually type your website address into their browser to visit your site.

You can read the article for specific details, but what Google is doing illustrates how little control you have over how search engines decide to categorize your website. From day to day, search engines are changing the way they evaluate and rank sites to improve the experience for the majority of their users, often at the expense of individual sites. While achieving high search engine rankings is certainly important and the risk of being blacklisted by Google may be remote, putting all your marketing eggs in the free search engine rankings basket just isn’t wise.

As for Microsoft, their new Internet Explorer 7 browser will recognize security certificates attached to websites that identify them as legitimate and verified and highlight the website address with a green bar in the visitor’s browser. The problem with this system is that many small businesses are not eligible to receive these security certificates and thus not able to qualify for the “safe site” green bar. If surfers begin to associate the green bar with legitimacy and not having the green bar with unsafe sites, this will put small businesses at a severe disadvantage compared to their larger competitors who do qualify.

Undoubtedly, Microsoft will eventually even the playing field for small businesses, but these articles highlight the need to earn legitimacy for your website from sources other than search engines and security certificates.

How?

You need to build relationships with other websites in your industry or niche on the internet. You need to get your legitimacy from the opinion makers in your market and stop simply relying on generic listings in search engines to drive traffic to your site.

How to effectively do this is what modern search engine marketing (and our business) is all about.

Hidden text is one of the oldest tricks webmasters try to use to fool search engines into ranking their pages higher than they may deserve.

These tactics are designed to show different content to users (who don’t see the text either because it’s hidden in the content (white text on white background for example) or hidden outside the viewable area of the page using CSS) than what is shown to search engine spiders.

Search engines have long been able to detect hidden text within a web page, but many webmasters thought trying to hide text using CSS was “safe” and that search engine spiders have no way to detect this.

But, a recent forum discussion at Cre8asite introduces the possibility that Google is indeed checking included CSS files for rules that could be used to hide text.

The lesson here is that trying to manipulate your natural rankings in search is a losing game.

You’re much better off creating new unique content for your site (what search engines want) than trying to stay one step ahead (and invariably falling behind) the latest technologies search engines are using to index sites.