A Creative Communications Agency

You can’t get something for nothing.

I remember my high school Economics teacher used to say TANSTAAFL (it rhymes with John’s brothel). It’s an acronym for There Ain’t No Such Think As A Free Lunch. In economic terms it means that everything has a cost associated with it. Whether it is a direct cost (the $100 you spend to by a gun) or an opportunity cost (once you buy a gun you can’t spend that money buying butter), there is a ramification for making a purchase decision.

Somewhere down the line, though, this concept was lost by marketers. They still believe that they get something for nothing.  Nowhere is this more evident than search engine optimization (SEO). I’m sure every car manufacturer —and dealers too — want to be the first result on Google when someone searches on “new cars”. (BTW the prize goes to Kelly Blue Book). Furthermore, they want a high search engine rank without paying any extra money.

This is the part of the article where I make a rather large assumption and base the rest of the article on it. You cannot get a high rank without spending advertising dollars. Companies are crawling out of the woodwork now telling you how they can increase your SEO.  The thing is that only the good people at Google and Yahoo know the exact algorithms very determining a search ranking. If a company comes to you with these promises, ask them if they guarantee page 1 results. If they say, “yes”, pay them once you are there. If they say “no”, save your money.

I believe the search engines rank sites based on relevance and popularity. The core job of a search engine is to return results that the user finds useful. That being said, the result must be relevant to the search terms. For the “new cars” search they are going to throw out companies that have “new cars” in their keywords, but are actually selling toasters.

In addition, the more popular a search result is (i.e. how many searchers find, click a particular link, and —beyond that — don’t come back to the search), the more likely the site is providing the information that the user is looking for. This is another highly regarded attribute by the search engine.

So in order for a company to get people to click on its link,  they need to do some MARKETING! They need to offer a great product and they need to promote that product. They need to pay to get their brand on the minds of the public so that people are familiar and comfortable with the brand. Then when the people see the brand name in the search results they will click on the link.

Now the SEO companies that I spoke about above will claim you need to configure your site for the ultimate SEO. They will tell you not to use Flash only pages, and use CSS, get links to your site on other sites. None of these strategies will materially affect your ranking.  Try this test for yourself, search on a few terms and check out the results on the first pages, see how many companies break the above mentioned rules.

I will admit, there a few certain things you must do to your site to be search engine friendly. You need a good, relevant page title; you need accurate —don’t go overboard — meta tag keywords and descriptions; and you can even place the important terms in the <h1> tags. Beyond that, though, you are wasting your time and money.

Finally, the best SEO is to BE the search term. Disney does not rely on people searching “family entertainment”. Most people search for “Disney”, or —better yet— they skip Google and type in ‘disney.com’ in their browser. Obtaining a position like that, though, takes good marketing and a lot of money.

Marketing Commandment 3:
Thou shall not expect positive results without spending marketing dollars