Background of Search Engine Marketing
Why use search engines?
First, some background. Why use search engines in your marketing? The reason is simple: search engines are one of the biggest places people go to find things online. So if you want to be found online, a search engine is one of the top places you should be.
How do search engines work?
How do search engines work? The basic premise is that any web page on earth can be available in the search results. The problem comes in that there are millions and millions of web pages, but when you or your prospects are searching for information about something, you don't want to search through millions of pages to find what you want. So instead of searching through millions of pages, you probably typically look at the first few results on the first page of the search results, and if your answer isn't in those few results, you likely type in a slightly different keyword phrase to help zone in on what you are looking for.
This means that the search engines have to have a relevant way to make the first few results the most relevant for your search. To do that, they have to use mathematical algorithmic formulas to determine the best result. And of course, in a perfect world, the best result would simply be the one page that most closely matched your search phrase. However, many people and companies are competing to be the most closely matched page for your search result, and many may be so close that just based on the content on the page, it would be impossible to determine what is truly the very best result.
Search engine results by proxy
Enter the founders of Google. They hypothesized that the best pages online would be visited by the most people, and more importantly, would be recommended by the most people. So by extension, the most relevant pages would have the most recommendations by other people. And when people recommend pages online, they create links on their site or web page with which to actually perform the recommendations. So, by extension, the more links a page has coming into it, all other things being held equal, the more popular that page is.
Of course, all things aren't equal, and almost immediately anyone wanting to get their web page ranked higher would simply get other websites to link to their webpage. And over time, people began getting more and more links to their web pages, and these links were not based on natural demand for a page, but instead were dictated by market conditions and competition. So to make a long story short, the search engines began imposing conditions on the linking structure, assigning values to different "qualities" of links, and began to add deeper levels of diagnosis of the content of the web page itself, to determine the appropriate ranking of a certain page in their search engines.
And each time the search engines changed their formula to make their search results more relevant, given the last round of commercial adaptation, savvy people who wanted higher rankings made adjustments to once again game and manipulate the search engines.
So at this point, we might simply conclude, well to get higher rankings, we simply have to be the fastest to adapt to the new search engine formula. The problem with this strategy over time is that in order to get search engine rankings and the associated traffic, one must constantly be changing the work he does to get those rankings.
Is there a better way? Enter article marketing.
But first, a little more background.
What Do Search Engines Really Want?
In all of these algorithmic changes, what do the search engines really want? In a nutshell, they want to deliver the best results to their searchers. And one of the things they have made very clear is that aside from algorithmic popularity elements, the most important thing is that the web page delivers relevant content to the searcher. In theory, they want the most relevant content, meaning words or sounds on a page, for that keyword search. In fact, all the popularity and ranking algorithms, for all their effort at evaluating how much the page is liked based on links, traffic, social involvement, etc., their sole goal is to deliver the page with the best content.
Now, the way they determine the best content varies over time, based on the changes in the algorithm. But the constant remains that they want the best content. So the question comes up, why not just create the very best content, get it noticed in the web environment, and trust the search engines to do the best job of finding that best content, instead of creating ho-hum content and then gaming the search engines into believing your ho-hum content is really better than it is by inflating it with links, traffic, and social involvement?