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Would You Let A Dog Or A Butler Market Your Website?
by Michael Cheney
The latest news to hit the Internet's 'water cooler' is that
Lycos and Ask Jeeves are to begin their own SEO services..
Search engine optimisation (or SEO) is any practice related
to the end goal of improving your website’s positioning
in the search engines.
The brief history of SEO is that it first started out solely
as the remit of the developers themselves. This was back in
the day when one person designed, built, maintained, hosted
and marketed a website.
The Ever-Changing Internet Landscape
During the past few years, however, the entire Internet industry
has divided up into a myriad divisions to such an extent that
SEO is now a booming sector in its own right. Entering the term
"seo" on Google returns nearly 20 million results!
Now businesses recognise that it is no longer possible to expect
one individual or company to possess all the necessary skills
‘under one roof’ to be able to achieve great results
on the graphic design, technical construction AND marketing
of their website.
This has led to the trend of bringing in specialist search engine
marketing consultants or companies to assist.
As Google and the like are spending millions every year on developing
their tools to accurately sift through the billions of web pages
that exist it really is a full time occupation just keeping
track of what has an effect on search engine ranking and which
strategies work best.
Everyone Wants 'Organic' Nowadays!
Ask Jeeves and Lycos are now offering their SEO service to help
companies get found in the ‘organic’ results of search
engines.
‘Organic’ results are those results in a search engine
listing that are non-paid. Almost all search engines now offer
businesses the shortcut of simply paying to get an ad listed
whereas as a latest study indicates that only 28% of searchers
will click on an advertisement as opposed to one of the ‘organic’
results (on Google).
This is the reason we’re all fighting for high rankings
in the ‘organic’ results. This demand from businesses
is also presumably the main driving factor behind Ask Jeeves
and Lycos starting to offer their own Search Engine Optimisation
services.
Money Well Spent?
In short - I’m not sure.
If you have a 50 page website, getting Lycos to provide you
with SEO services will cost you a tidy $10,000. They also include
the questionable tactic of re-submitting your website over and
over to search engines which is both pointless and risky as
some will act against those that submit more than once.
$10,000 sounds like a lot to me for a service that is only dealing
with search engines and which talks of ‘recommendations’
that you then have to implement yourself.
Really though - it comes down to what you are trying to achieve
with your website.
My two cents on this is that the Lycos service doesn’t
devote enough attention to links - your money may be better
spent on getting more high quality in-bound links or on a well-managed
Pay Per Click Campaign.
Ask Jeeves
http://www.askjeeves.com
Lycos' SEO Service
http://ranking.lycos.com/sitesidemore.html
Search Engine Users Survey
http://www.clickz.com/stats/sectors/software/article.php/3348071
About the Author
Michael Cheney is Author of The Website Marketing BibleTM. Take
the Free 7-Part Course "Internet Marketing Made Easy"
and get your free sampler of 'The Bible' here: http://www.websitemarketingbible.com/marketing/
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