Sanity check

What the mainstream mdeia think

[pixel_juice]

Small Business: How to get to the top of the search engine pile
[timesonline.co.uk...]
Source: Times Online

Reading this article felt like a hell of a timewarp to me. I kept scrolling back to the original post date just to make sure.

a €10,000 investment in search-engine optimisation saw his company jump from page four in the American Google rankings to a current ranking in the top 10 for “Ireland tours, travel and vacation”

Top 10 for a 5 letter keyphrase (with a stopword). Woohoo!

More seriously, it doesn't look like SEO or any form of website promotion has moved that far in terms of public perception. I'm still reading phrases like 'dark art' in this type of article, which frankly surprises me.

Any thoughts?

[edited by: jatar_k at 12:16 am (utc) on Sep. 19, 2006]

[httpwebwitch]

now, if he ranked for "ireland", "tours", "travel" and "vacation" separately or in small combinations, that would be something to brag about.

an article obviously not aimed at this audience. To many of their readers that article may have been an epiphany, or an introduction that would lead them to further research.

or not.

[gamiziuk]

I say - let them keep thinking that!

LOL

[le_gber]

Let's see:

[...]my initial website was very pretty, but absolutely useless in terms of generating business. Nobody visited it, full stop [...]

[...]but I have increased the leads generated by my website more than 10-fold

well 10 x 0 still equals 0 to me :)

Directories, such as Yahoo, have staff paid to consider every new website submitted before slotting them into categories or subsections

isn't Yahoo using a crawler called SLURP? Didn's they stop accepting paid submission to their directory in every countries but the US?

One option here is to find out what your competitors’ links are. This is done by keying their web address in to the Google search box, preceded by the command “link:”

I thought that this commad was broken like 3 years ago

Search-engine optimisation — or search-engine marketing

well no, SEO!= SEM

One-word searches are rare, so ideally use phrases and not single words.

should that be one word searches that convert are rare - I thought one word searches were still the 'more common'

[sem4u]

FIRST, make sure you have registered with all the big search engines. Their sites will have a facility enabling you to do this, usually for free.

Why? There is no need these days, athough Google sitemaps is useful to sign up with.

[httpwebwitch]

yes, pay me $70 and I'll submit your site to 8000 search engines. Does that bring back any memories?

[ytswy]

yes, pay me $70 and I'll submit your site to 8000 search engines. Does that bring back any memories?

*shudder* I was just starting out when that stuff was at its height. I was so naive that it's a good thing I didn't have any money..