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Whether it's search marketing or any other business that you want to get
into, no person, book, website, or seminar can make you successful; not in
15 minutes, 15 days, or even 15 years. Only *you* can make yourself

successful, and it can only happen through hard work, dedication, and
creativity.  Resources and teachers can point you in the right direction,
but being successful is an ongoing, lifelong process that can't be taught.
Success comes from doing and -- surprisingly enough -- from making a whole
bunch of mistakes along the way.  So stop reading those get-rich-quick
websites, and start trying your hand at doing stuff. The worst that will
happen is you'll have a few mess-ups along the way.  As long as you learn
from them, then you're on the right track.

As to opening up an SEO company after taking an SEO training class, I am
having a difficult time imagining any class that could get you up to speed
quickly enough to own a company that gets paid to optimize other people's
sites. Even our own High Rankings Seminar is just a start.  You simply

can't learn SEO in a few days. You have to try things, see what works for
you and what doesn't, and then adjust from there.  Since results can take
time, you won't even know if you're really good at SEO until you've been
practicing it (hopefully on your own sites or on those of your friends) for
at least 1 year, if not longer.

So please, don't even think about becoming another in a long line of
get-rich-quick SEO people.  The world is already way too full of them!

Which leads us to today's article.

++No Quick Fixes with Search Engine Optimization++

Wouldn't it be great if we could simply edit Meta tags and get high
rankings?

Many years ago I read Stephen R. Covey's "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective
People." One thing Covey discusses is the glitter of the "Personality
Ethic." He mentions how some people try to find some "quick and easy way to
achieve quality of life ... without going through the natural process of
work and growth that makes it possible." Then he goes on to say, "The
Personality Ethic is illusory and deceptive. And trying to get high quality
results with its techniques and quick fixes is just about as effective as
trying to get to some place in Chicago using a map of Detroit."

What Covey says is nearly identical to what I've been saying for years
regarding search engine optimization: There are simply no quick fixes.

I wish I had a dime for every potential client who came to me and said, "We
just need you to fix our Meta tags so our site will rank highly with search
engines." These people don't realize that if it were simply a matter of
fixing Meta tags, they could probably do it themselves!

Why Not Meta Tags?

Search engines don't have a whole lot to work with when trying to figure out
which sites to show in their list of results for any given keyword search.
Considering this, it's actually quite amazing how relevant most search
results tend to be, given the sheer number of pages on the Internet these
days.

For an internal search engine that just searches through pages or products
on your site, the information provided in the Meta keyword tag can really
help to narrow down the most relevant pages that one of your site users
might be searching for.

Unfortunately, the differences between an internal search engine and a
public one such as Google are many.  For instance, with an internal engine,
there are only a relatively small number of pages or products to search
through to find a relevant page. Plus, the content and Meta tags on the site
are trustworthy, since your goal and that of your internal search engine is
to help people find exactly what they're looking for on your site.

On the other hand, with major search engines, their database contains
basically every page on the web that they know about.  They can't
necessarily trust the Meta tags they find since a site owner's goals may not
necessarily be the same as the major search engines' goal (i.e., you would
like your site to show up in the search results as much as possible for as
many keyword phrases as possible, but the search engine would like to show
the most relevant pages, whether those are yours or someone else's).

This makes changing or adding Meta tags on your site neither a quick fix nor
a slow fix. It won't fix anything and it won't have any effect on your
search engine traffic.

What About Content?

Sure, you can add all kinds of content to your site and hope that will be a
quick fix, but writing lots of good content cannot be done quickly.  It will
generally take years of writing a little bit every day or every week, to
eventually end up with a genuine archive of truly useful information.  It's
highly doubtful that if you're somehow generating 100 pages a week, you're
actually creating good content. You're either stealing from elsewhere,
auto-generating it from some sort of icky software program, or you're some
kind of robot with too much time on your hands!

How About Links?

It is true that links are very important to helping your site gain
visibility and search engine traffic.  But quick-fix link schemes are not
going to result in long-term high rankings for your site. Everyone knows to
avoid "link farms," but nobody seems to quite know what they are.  No worry,
because it doesn't matter whether something is a link farm or a link scheme
or a link popularity bonanza software extravaganza.  If you set out to get
links for the sole purpose of increasing your search engine rankings, you're
already thinking backwards.

Forget about link popularity and instead think about your target audience
and how you can let them know your site exists. It's really just marketing,
plain and simple. You have a website and a business that presumably is
[better] [more unique] [cheaper] [friendlier] than the others out there and
it needs to be marketed. You may even have to <gasp> spend a little money to
publicize your site. Good, old-fashioned newspaper, magazine, and even TV
ads that mention your website can really get your site noticed.  The more
visible your site is, the more it will be talked about in the right circles,
and the more links it will obtain just because.  Even PPC ads can help,
because they put your site in front of people looking for what you offer.
The point is that people have got to find your site one way or another while
you're waiting for your SEO campaign to kick in.  It's your job to figure
out how to get it in front of them as often as you can.

Regardless of how you market your site, don't count on becoming an overnight
sensation.

This brings us back to Covey's Personality Ethic. Sure, someone can edit
your Meta tags quickly and submit to 50 billion search engines and trade
links with 90 million useless sites. However, if you haven't invested the
time up front to create a website with great content that speaks to the
reader in plain language that real people use (in other words, without
technology buzzwords), you will not see good long-term results.

How To Achieve Long-term Results

You may achieve high rankings very quickly for words that nobody is
searching for, but as Covey so aptly put it, these will be illusory and
deceptive results at best. If no one uses those words in the engine's search
box, all the #1 rankings in the world won't keep your business afloat.

It's imperative to think of the search engine optimization process as a
long-term investment for your site, so here are 5 tips to help you invest in
your future success:

1.  Thoroughly research your keyword phrases using the paid versions of
Wordtracker <http://www.highrankings.com/wordtracker> or KeywordDiscovery
<http://www.highrankings.com/keyworddiscovery>.  Keyword research is
completely and utterly the key to everything that is search marketing.

2. Make sure your site is not made up of graphics alone, as these cannot be
read by the search engine spiders that come a-crawling. (This is especially
true of graphics that look like text -- these are often used when a
particular font is desired.)

3. Be sure to use natural, easy-to-understand language that conveys the
message of your website and includes keyword phrases you'd like your site to
rank highly for.

4. Make sure your Title tags and link anchor text all jibe with the visible
content on the page.

5. Be patient! You knew I'd end with that one, but with Google's aging delay
in place for new sites, patience is more important than ever. It's most
likely going to be a good 9 months before you start seeing much (if any)
traffic from Google's natural results. Don't be discouraged, but instead
use that time to constantly make your site better than the other guy's.

Remember, you are working toward the future. Good placement achieved by
doing things the right way will have staying power over time with very
little additional effort. Like everything in life, if you spend the time and
money to do it right to begin with, the long-term results will always be
impressive.

Jill

Jill Whalen of High Rankings® is an internationally recognized search engine optimization consultant and host of the free weekly High Rankings® Advisor search engine marketing newsletter. Jill's handbook, "The Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines" teaches business owners how and where to place relevant keyword phrases on their Web sites so that they make sense to users and gain high rankings in the major search engines.

Jill specializes in search engine optimization, SEO consultations, site analysis reports, SEM seminars and is the co-founder of the new search marketing and website design company, Search Creative, LLC.

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