Pelican Web Design Studio

Any search engine will always try to return whatever it has available that it thinks is the most relevant data to a specific query based upon ranking criteria set by the specific search service itself. That is the search service's core mission.

Given the time and motivation, the stupidest human will win out over the smartest computer every time. Did you by any chance see the movie Jurassic Park? In that movie Jeff Goldblum had a line that said: life will always find a way That sums up the essence of this concept pretty well. Every single thing a spidering search engine does has a pattern. It does absolutely nothing without being told to do it for a specific purpose. No matter how many variables exist, no matter how complicated an algorithm may appear, there is a pattern and that pattern can be found by any human willing to look long enough and at enough variables. If it is too hard for you to understand, then you are 100% correct. Spiders are nothing more than computer programs and they are dead. They do not get vibes, premonitions or intuitions. They don't get scared, steamed up, mad as #### or lovesick. If they have been programmed correctly, they do not waiver, hesitate or sacrifice for the greater good. They only do EXACTLY what the humans doing the programming told them to do. It is a tool and nothing more. Once you understand this concept, you have a huge advantage over the machine. You can guess, imagine, deduce and realize what the machine is attempting to do and then second guess its actions and re-actions. You can test theories and make changes based on your findings very quickly while the machine will take considerably more resources to alter its behavior to attempt to counteract any human's behavior.

Spidering engines do not put the good stuff at the top. Instead, they try to put the bad stuff at the bottom. While this statement, at first glance, may seem no more than a variation based upon semantics, it is in fact, the single most eye-opening revelation I had when I first began targeting top placements within spidering search engine results. In the beginning, like most people, I was thinking that the best sites got the top spots. I tried to build the "best" site for each topic at hand. After a few failed attempts, it hit home that "best" is a completely subjective term. What is "best" to me, may not be "best" to you. In fact, when it comes to websites that I have built compared to websites that you have built, disagreement as to the definition of best is virtually guaranteed. The same principle applies to the person writing the program telling the spider what to "think". Once I accepted that defining best was subjective, it became more important to me to find out what the search engine thought was best than to cling to my self-centered view of my own definition. I realized that if I wanted a top placement, what I thought was best didn't matter, only what the search engine thought mattered. This is the concept that got me to start learning how to reverse engineer my competitor's sites. As I began looking intensely for things that formed a pattern within the top 10 results for any given search, it became apparent that there were indeed several things that appeared to make the search engine think a particular site was "good" for a match for a specific query. The most obvious ones being, (keep in mind we're going back to late 1996 here), keywords in the meta keyword tag, keywords in the title tag and keywords in the meta description tag. As I learned how to look better, keyword density, link structure, H tags and the more obscure things such as meta refreshes were exposed. After looking at literally thousands of sites over a few months, one thing became very clear. The sites the search engine thought were good enough to be on top, were some of the most gawd awful looking sites on the planet. Stark white backgrounds with colored text and disproportionate H tags making the top 10 sites look more like a ransom note written by a third grade drop out than anything that could be realistically considered a professional sales presentation. There could be little justification from anyone that these top sites in the results were the top sites in terms of being "best" using any kind of measuring stick. Why? How could the search engine get it so wrong? Then it started becoming clear to me. You can't write a program to add relevancy points to a document based on emotional responses. You can't tell a program to put a pretty site at the top of the results. You can't tell it to reward ease of navigation because a spider has no concept of easy. So, it's not that all the really cool, advanced, cutting edge, multi-media stuff in web design and functionality were being penalized, just ignored, while things that could be given a mathematical boost were virtually void of any esthetic value. It is easy to tell a spider to add and subtract for specific data. You can tell it to subtract points if characters are repeated in specific parts of a web document. In other words, you can tell it to penalize a document if the same word appears multiple times in a title tag or a keyword tag. If one word or phrase is over-repeated too many times in visible text. You can tell it to look for specific things like same color text as background but after all these years, the brightest programming minds devoted to search have yet to come up with anything any better than simply ignoring the meta keyword tag all together, just as one example of the limitations of a spider. On the other hand, you can not add points to a site if it looks good or is easy to use. Or if it sells better than another related site. In other words, those things that most humans would consider necessary before a specific site could be considered as best. My conclusion was that writing a program to find good stuff and put it at the top of a set of results was much more difficult, (if possible at all), than writing a program to find bad stuff and put that at the bottom. You may be wondering just what significance, if any, this may have on what you do or how you see your own relationship with spidering engines. All I can do is tell you what impact accepting this concept had on me and hope it at least gives you something else to consider. To this day you can find SEO, (whatever that is), forums, telling people that if they want to get top placements, all they have to do is build the best site they can, keep adding content and the placements will come. This is simply not the case in my experience. You have to first accept that there are at least two participants in the judging of best. You and the thing doing the judging and it is the thing doing the judging that matters. If your definition of best is different than the engine you are targeting, you lose! A much more accurate piece of advice would be telling people to build a site the target search engine thinks is best and that is not the same thing. Accepting this concept enabled me to realize that if the objective is to build the best site AND place well on major spidering search engines, then what I thought was best had nothing to do with it. It enabled me to accept that, more often than not, a site that could place at #1 for a search term was not the site that would convert traffic to customers very easily. It enabled me to see beyond the marketing hype of major search services and "see" the frailties and learn how to best deal with them. It taught me to understand setting objectives and strategies with websites and then building them to meet those objectives. If search engines really could write programs to put the good at the top instead of putting the bad at the bottom, I would likely take a very different approach, but at least for the foreseeable future, they can't. They have to rely on simply reading characters in source codes and adjusting relevancy points accordingly and now, thanks to link popularity, they rely also on humans to tell the spider what is good. That has made it better, but the spider program has a way of not letting human input win because the system still works the same even with links being counted. A program can filter for too many this or too few that, but it still can not reward, or even recognize, good. Therefore, it can not put good at the top, it can only identify what the programmer thinks is bad and put that at the bottom.

SEO'S, (whatever that is), do NOT manipulate search engines. I've seen SEO, (whatever that is), defined as the art of manipulating the search engines. That is false. If you set out to place a web page on the first page of results for a target keyword or phrase thinking you are manipulating the search engine, you are doomed to fail. Thinking you are forcing the search engine to do anything is a mistake. Thinking you are hiding anything from a search engine is a mistake. The only answer to top placement is recognizing what a search engine does, accepting that, assessing the potential rewards and risks and working within those confines. It is often very difficult and time consuming to identify exactly what it is a search engine does and how it does it. Algorithms can be very complex and just how far you want to dig is up to each individual doing the digging. This is what separates the diddlers from the hitters. It really has nothing to do with how smart you are. It has much more to do with how much time and/or money you are willing to invest to learn the quirks of a specific engine. With many people, myself included, there comes a point of diminishing returns where it makes more sense to simply understand the concepts and base your actions on educated guesses more so than researching another 100 pages under another 100 phrases on another 5 search engines. Also, keep in mind, success breeds success. As long as you apply the concepts and your sites capture those top spots and generate sales, then you can accept that you are right and act accordingly. The only person or persons who can manipulate a search engine, are the persons who have access to the admin panel and/or source code of that specific search engine. If you can't get to the admin panel, you can have no effect whatsoever on what that search engines does. All you can do is construct data that you feel is most likely to fall within the parameters of the algorithm. That is NOT manipulating search engines, that is learning how search engines work and then manipulating your page. No matter how vehemently some so-called SEO's, (whatever that is), disagree, that is a fact! No one can "help" a search engine find what they are looking for anymore than anyone can "make" a search engine do what they want. Search engines just do what they do. They are only a machine! This may seem like a very minor point to some, but this is the main concept that has caused so much division within the search engine marketing community. The misunderstanding or failure to recognize this concept is the reason some people try to hide content thinking they are fooling the search engines and why some people become so militant about saving the planet from search engine spammers. Both camps are missing the glaringly obvious. I have no interest whatsoever in taking one side or the other. To me it is a stupid, pointless, circular debate with nothing but losers on both sides regardless of the outcome. You have to decide for yourself what to do with the information I pass on here. I only share it for the purpose of telling you how I became able to target specific placements in the hope that you become able to achieve top placements for yourself, hopefully making your web site more successful and a better resource to your target market. For those of you who want to know how I did it, learning, understanding and accepting these concepts is the key.

There is no such thing as search engine spam and why. In the first place, we all need to get a fresh grip on reality and remember that spam is luncheon meat. Back in the 80's, some tech geek who was a fan of a British TV comedy from the 70's called Monty Python's Flying Circus, thought a particular bit done on that show was funny and somehow related that bit to the people he felt was taking his domain away from him. He wanted the internet to be left solely to him and his buddies spending their days and nights on BBS feeling like a part of an elite group. He did not want to allow commercialism to invade their world. He promoted the term on some of his bulletin boards and being others there like-minded, the term caught on. Much like other net jargon that really has no meaning. Like SEO, (whatever that is). But commercial will become, anything that generates billions of eyeballs a day. When some of those eyeballs are behind the lids of consumers who can afford an upscale product such as a desktop, you can rest assured that the salesman cometh. And with little regard to what name is given to his modus operandi. Don't misunderstand, I hate getting hundreds of offers a day to enlarge my naughty bits as much as anyone else. Can you imagine the size of my penis if I responded to even half of those offers? YIKES! I'm certainly not condoning people forging headers, harvesting emails by trolling forums or buying lists from others who have trolled forums. Forging headers is not Spam. That is lying. Redirecting through someone else's server to avoid paying your own expenses is not Spam. That is stealing. Taking private information without permission is not Spam. That is theft. Those things are wrong and should be dealt with by law enforcement agencies. Calling those things Spam only makes it confusing and more difficult for those persons doing those things to be prosecuted. I'm also not condoning people who sign up for free goodies or subscribe to newsletters and then forget they did it, or enter contests without reading the TOS. Those people are not being spammed. They are being sent material they agreed to get and to agree, take the benefits of the free goodies and then complain as an innocent victim is at the root of the problem as much as the worst perpetrator of the forging, trolling, harvesting persuasion. There is a place for email marketing and no matter what one side or the other says, it is here and it will be here as long as it is profitable. But, as so often happens with this particular discussion, we are talking about unsolicited commercial email, not search engine spam. I too have drifted off topic due to the confusing nature of so many people within a group using a term that no one really understands, for the simple fact that the term has never been defined as any thing other than luncheon meat. It is a term used by many, solely to justify their own position, regardless of what that position is. Let's get back on topic shall we? There is no such thing as search engine spam! If you have read Basic Concept of SEO #4 and agree with that, then this concept is easy to accept. Keep in mind, I'm not trying to convince you to agree with my take on the topic. You are free believe whatever you like and I know that. I'm just telling you how I saw it and what impact that had on my results. That said, if you can agree that you or I can not manipulate search engine results without having access to the source code or at least an admin panel, then there can be no other conclusion but that search engines can not be spammed, tricked, mislead, bribed or coerced. All that can be done is build data that you believe best complies with what it is a specific program does with specific data and then give it that data. You can submit that data to a search service but from there, what that search engine program does with that data is beyond your control. You can control the data you provide but you can not control what the search engine does with that data once it has it. That alone eliminates the entire premise of spamming a search engine. Once you undertake the task of building data that you believe will place in the top of the results for a specific query, now it is only a matter of degrees. Puts me in mind of the old joke about the man at a party who sees a stunning redhead and asks if they could share a bed if he paid the redhead a million dollars. The redhead, obviously flattered, says "yes". The man then says, "ok, how about 50 bucks?", The redhead looks terribly offended and asks the man, "just what do you think I am", to which the man replies, "well, we've already established what you are, now we're simply negotiating price". A matter of degrees. The same with anyone who has ever claimed to take any action, no matter how slight, to attain a better position in a search engine. If a you believe a search engine can be spammed, then either you also believe we are all at least a little guilty or you are a hypocrit. My opinion of course. Once I was able to accept that it is the search engines themselves that promote the term spam for the purpose of shifting responsibility for their own lack of ability to actually define relevancy onto those nasty spammers, I was able to see it much more clearly as a pure business proposition. I was able to compete and charge my clients fairly. I was able to set objectives and strategies based on targeted traffic generation. I was able to get very good at gaining top placements in any keyword arena. I was able to guarantee results. I was able to accept that I don't make the rules, I just play the game and start winning that game I had decided to play. A search engine is just a machine. A tool. When we beat on the side of the TV to get a better picture, are we spamming the TV? If we use a screwdriver to get into our apartment because we left our keys inside, are we spamming the door, the screwdriver or our keys? Silly question huh? Tools and machines just do what they do and their sole purpose is to serve mankind. In the context of search engine marketing, the emphasis is on marketing. When I see a competitor placed above me, I always force myself to remember that no one but the mentally challenged wants to do the work of top placements just for bragging rights. The only reason to devote so much effort, focus and cash is marketing. So to call someone a spammer is like accusing someone of competeing too much or trying to make too much profit. Again, it simply comes down to a marketing objective. Top placement brings not it's own rewards. It is merely a means to an end. A single component of a sale. The first step of making a sale is to get warm bodies in the door. Once I was able to accept this, I was able to stop wasting my time looking at a search engine as anything other than a tool and start placing my focus on using that tool to generate traffic. That freed my time to learn how to identify customers navigation through the site, content management, and presenting the features, benefits and calls to action that actually generated conversions. It's all about conversions and search engines know that as well as anyone.

Content is king --- when it needs to be king or The power of knowing when to shut up. I believe, "content is king", is the mantra of the cyber blind. I’m referring to those people who are quite content to accept the validity of the words of anyone who can make a sentence sound intelligent in a forum, without having to actually stop and think for themselves about what the sentence means. To accept what another says without doing anything to verify the statement, relieves you of the responsibility of having to learn it for yourself and the liability of possibly being wrong. I urge you to always consider the source carefully and compare it to your own experiences before accepting anything. Question everything and test all things purported to be proven facts. At the very least, stop and apply some logic and common sense to a statement you have read before advocating it to others. If you make up your own mind and decide something to be true, then remember that when you repeat that, you may very well be creating your own competition. Once you "know" something, that something has value and it should never be given away without you knowing what return you want for that value. I walked a sales floor for many years and like far too many who had come before me, as a young sales person, I liked hearing the sound of my own voice. Once I became acquainted with the product, I realized I had something that my prospective customer did not. Knowing something he didn't made me think I was smart. Being a personable kind of chap, I could easily relate to most people and that luckily, got me enough sales to let me keep the job, but I was constantly coming in as the low man on the totem pole at the weekly sales meetings where accolades and financial rewards were showered on to the top producers. I wanted those accolades as much as the financial rewards. There was one man there, much older than I, who was consistently getting those accolades. He was never out of the top three sales people week in and week out. While I was convinced he was so old that surely I must be a lot smarter than he was, I still wanted to know how he did it. One day I decided to schmooze him a little and paid him some really shallow compliment and then asked him what his secret was. He told me quite unceremoniously that I talked too much. I never did warm up to this guy but I couldn't get those words out of my head. I thought salesmen were supposed to have the gift of gab. I thought the whole premise of being a salesman was to talk fast to keep customers off their toes. As I started paying attention to what I was actually saying to customers, I started noticing that when they came in looking for a TV, I wanted to show them how knowledgeable I was so I would tell them about the new technology coming out soon. Well, guess what, now the customer wasn't so sure he wanted what he thought he wanted, now he wanted to wait and learn about the new stuff I had told him about. Once a customer asked about a sofa advertised on sale. I wanted to impress her with how much I knew about the construction of the sofa so I asked her if she wanted pine supports or oak. Did she need fabric protection? Did she want tongue and groove supports? I impressed her with my knowledge all right, but in the process I made her feel uniformed and ill-prepared. All she wanted was the sofa we had advertised because she knew she could afford it. Even though we had the sofa at that price, she still walked. Walked quickly in fact because I had made her feel stupid. I was the one being stupid. When we blindly follow the "content is king" advice given by so many, without having any objective for the content we think is king, we are doing exactly what I was doing with the TV customer and the sofa lady. We may be trying to impress with our artistic flair for the graphic arts, or maybe we want to just show them how prolific we are at belaboring a point. Either way, we lose the prospective buyer because we weren't saying what they wanted to hear and/or we make them feel stupid by forcing them to deal with things they weren't prepared for. There is only one reason for content and that is to meet an objective. If the objective is to get more placements for more keyword terms, then that is fine. The question is simply, "what terms"? If you can answer that question, fine. Build away, check your results to make sure your strategy is working and that you are hitting your objective. Once you get the process down, pick another term and build more content for that term. By the same token, if you have another product or service or point, develop the content to achieve the goal you desired when you first made the decision to offer the product, service or point. It is easy to talk yourself out of a sale. That old sales man did more for me than any other person I've met since. He doesn't even know it, but he taught me the power of knowing when to shut up. A lesson that has changed my life. This concept applies to search engines as well as people. I’m not discounting the value of content. As I said, if you have something to say and know why you’re wanting to say it, then by all means, say it. I’m just saying that once I came to understand that content is NOT king, and that having an objective for content is, things became much easier in terms of not only placements, but conversions as well. In my opinion, building content for the sake of content is the ultimate selfish waste. Just putting words on a web document hoping some search engine will rank it for some term is not going to do anyone any good, least of all you. Placement without purpose is the epitome of irony. "Small words, spoken in truth, can sway the minds of nations. But I don't care who you are, keep talking long enough and you are sure to say something stupid."

Why off site optimization is here to stay. Throughout the previous 6 concepts, I tried to make it clear that the driving force behind all of the concepts is the fact that spidering search engines have limitations and those limitations are what determines how and why a search engine works as it does. Many people in the net marketing industry throw the word relevancy around as though it were a solid thing that we can see, touch and smell. It is not. It too is a concept. An ideal. It is completely subjective. That is to say that relevancy is in the eye of the beholder. Even when it comes to straight text researching, there can be degrees of relevancy from one researcher to another. The New York Times can report on the exact same story as the San Francisco Chronicler, so who’s to say which is more relevant? Which story comes up on top of a search for that story? Back in 1998, ( before any one much had even heard of Google), one day we noticed that one of our promotional web hosting sites was in the top 5 on Alta Vista for home loans and our home loan site was nowhere to be found. This justified considerable effort in reverse engineering because both terms had extreme commercial value when in the top 5, but no web host was going to pay much to see his site #2 for home loans. There was no reference to the term home loan anywhere on our web hosting site. Not in the title, metas, graphics or text. We finally found the word web hosting in a link to describe a list of clients sites on another domain. We used foolishly list every client we had on several of our sites and on one of those pages, there was the connection. That day, my eyes were opened to the fact that search engines can not determine relevancy and are forced to rely on human review to even be able to offer the “perception” of relevancy. Human reviewed data does not have to mean getting a link from DMOZ, (lottsa luck!) and it doesn’t have to mean paying Yahoo’s $299. Any time a human puts a link to a website that he doesn’t own, that is human reviewed data. That is what’s come to be known as link popularity and that is what Google turned into Page Rank and went to #1 with. You are free to look at Google’s PR anyway you like. You are welcome to see it as many do, as the single greatest accomplishment of the new millennium and fully entitles Google to 70+% of all searches. Or you may see it as I do. An admission of defeat in the endeavor to replace human judgment with a computer program. I’m not a futurist and I don’t know what this world will be like in 20 years or in 20 minutes, but I’m confident enough to bet my business that no program is going to be able to replace human emotion, human principles and human judgment in the foreseeable future. If I’m right, then spidering engines have no choice but to build more systems to utilize to their own advantage those emotions, principles and judgments. That means links. We saw this coming back in 1998 and became deeply involved in promoting the human reviewed data industry, which we still do. We have seen enough to convince us that we all are now in a new age of SEO. It is no longer about meta tags, title tags, re-directs or cloaking scripts. It is about human review. Links. It is true that the spidering engines certainly do use a lot of variations of very complicated filtering technologies. It is also true that, at least in most instances, those filtering algorithms can enhance the searching experience when used in conjunction with human influenced data. Being aware of those filtering systems and how to comply with them is still crucial to place well, but, there can be no question in our minds, off-site optimization is the key that unlocks the secrets to the top spots. It’s all about the right link, saying the right thing from the right site.

Never forget you're placements are always at the mercy and whims of the search engines. You may own the website, but the search engine owns the placement Never forget it. If you don’t anticipate disaster, you are at risk. If you don’t have contingency plans, you are at risk. If you trust the search services that you don’t own or control to continue providing you with traffic and profits, you are dead! It is only a matter of time. Whether you consider yourself a white hat SEO, (whatever that is), or a black hat SEO, (whatever that is), your placements will not remain constant. Unless of course no one else wants them in the first place. You are ever at the mercy of the next update. This statement has recently been supported by a lot of cries of foul from people who claim their sites were totally clean, (whatever that is), yet they too suffered at the hands of the Florida update. {Personal comment} I wonder how it must feel to live in that little fantasy world where you really believe Google likes you because you have always followed Googles’s guidelines to the letter irregardless of how vague or pointless and now you too are doomed to oblivion with “spammers”. OUCH! That’s gotta hurt.
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We have sites that have been generating traffic from top placements for over 6 years now and I still know that they could be gone tomorrow and we are prepared. I’m not telling anyone what to do or how to do it, (remember, these are just concepts), but if you operate multiple domains, there are ways that protects your assets and a ways that just makes you think you are being productive or maybe just sneaky. If you are doing the latter, you are mistaken and it is only a matter of time until you either start all over, find another source of traffic or cease to exist as a commercial enterprise.

There is a lot more that can be said on the topic of search engine marketing. Lord knows no one needs me to say it. You don’t have to look very far on the net to hear someone else talking about it. My little contribution to the topic is not for discussion. It is not my opinion and it is not up for debate. These are just the main points that I learned through trial and error. Failure and success. You are welcome to use them, ridicule them or pay them no mind. Just remember that search engine marketing is a moving target. Education, application and evaluation are the answer and not listening to another guru. Finally, placements are nothing. Sales are everything. Top placements are only a means to an end. If that end doesn’t result in something happening you wanted to happen, then a #1 spot is a failure. Planning, objectives and strategies and hitting your numbers is what its all about. If you can hit your numbers without top placements then do it and save yourself the grief.