If search engines aren’t showing your website data to potential customers, your marketing guys are fighting with one arm tied behind their back. The immediate knee jerk remedy is “lets do some SEO”. Unfortunately the garden verity of  SEO  hawked today is a great idea that has lost its way!

To understand why, we need to ask: who really controls the turf?  No prizes for guessing that  its the search engines and their algorithms. For all practical purposes we can replace the generic term “Search Engine” with Google. Not just because Google controls a commanding market share but also because most others have started aping many of the techniques pioneered by Google.  Following is a chart showing how the top 3 stack up as of last month:

Google and other search engines have been trying to cover as much of the web as possible and find innovative ways of showing relevant and useful content to a user. The last thing they want to encourage is people attempting to manipulate the results by pushing a site higher up even if it did not represent the most relevant information for a given user query.

This basic fact means that search engines don’t really appreciate being fooled, they are trying hard to curb the practice and in many cases have penalized sites by dropping them all together.

What surprises us most is the willingness of companies to adopt these questionable techniques without pausing to think about getting the basics right, though in  most companies its just a case of ignorance. The next post will focus on these basics and simple steps to implement them in your organization.