MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

PageRank is the online currency, although not the only one, because there are still other search giants that don’t trade in PageRank. However, many webmasters and marketers vest much of their interests in that little green Rank-o-meter in the browser toolbar we all know so well.

Trends, it cannot be ignored, are there to be followed. It was once the place of every marketer to squeeze relevantly selected keywords into all the right slots, and that would be it. No cutting edge marketing campaigning needed - simply juicing the Meta elements would be enough get somewhere in the search engine results. Now it is different. Some years after the turn of the millennium, the goal posts have shifted so far back that your full efforts are usually not enough to rank a highly competitive page.

So now I get the feeling, that any web page that has a reasonable page rank value is owned or managed by someone who knows it. I’m talking now about the process of negotiating backlinks and web partnerships from sites that are relevant to mine, or my clients. So now I try to appeal to various site owners that my target page topic is more than relevant to theirs, yet I still have trouble getting them to put up a link to it. This mentality is making the legitimate link building process harder by the day, while people put all the focus on the value-out-of ten of your page. Also, with the recent attitude of one search engine giant, a whole population of web advertisers have been told to alter their advertising paid links to be ignored by the search engine robots, so as not to manipulate search engine results away from the absolutely objective. This has caused widespread controversy, but who can argue with the biggest search company ever?

So with these burdens wearing away the patience of many Internet marketers - who are always under pressure to meat their goals and get paid - some of them are turning to extreme measures, using all their technical web savvy to get to the finish line sooner. In an interview with Matt Inman of SEOmoz, Joe Whyte finds out about a unique strategy Matt uses to promote his personal dating website, where he creates clever quizzes that he offers freely to the public, to use and abuse as we wish. An example is the “cadaver calculator” where you can answer some simple questions about your lifestyle, and the program will work out how much your dead body would be worth in Dollars, and display it to you. He claims to have acquired several thousands of natural backlinks to his geo-targeted landing pages from such quizzes, by offering them as code to be placed on any blog or site, and these links beget links over time. Such is the calibre of cunning needed to get that vital kick-start into the competitive rat race that all the little guys consider their daily grind.

In this game, where PageRank is the sought-after currency, it would seem the trend is actually the same as the oldest principles in life: if you want to do it the legitimate way, then create something of value to others. Give some to get some.