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Search Engine Marketing Myths Uncovered

It’s no secret that Search Engine marketing can drive significant amounts of very qualified traffic to a web site – as 85% of Internet users utilize search engines to find/research for goods and services. The problem for many companies is the difficulty they face sifting through conflicting information and hyperbole! Here are top five myths that need to be run to ground.

Myth One – Search engine ranking leads are not as good as those which originate from other forms of traditional marketing (print, direct mail, PR, etc.) – this is absolute false, the truth is many agencies don’t have a clue about search engine marketing, so they push their clients to ignore this form of advertising. They simply don’t want to recommend anything they don’t understand and/or utilize an interactive marketing vehicle that requires a blend of very specialized technology and processes.

Myth Two – Effective search engine marketing can be done in house – this is rarely the case, the sheer complexity and online competition for rankings makes this extremely difficult for most companies. Large number of business owners don’t understand the basic fundamentals of search engine; i.e. how to properly use keywords, meta tags and titles and worse, don’t submit their web sites to top Directories (Yahoo, LookSmart, DMOZ, etc.) and the hundreds of smaller directories.

Most companies delegate the search engine submissions to the webmaster or web site development staff and they just don’t have the time to understand the daunting complexities required to generate page 1-3 rankings - or to stay abreast of the shifting submissions and ranking criteria standards, as modified monthly by top search engines. And, in many companies the search engine ranking is added to the over worked webmaster’s tasks purely as an afterthought – as opposed to being addressed formally by the marketing department, with dedicated personnel and a budget.

Myth Three – off the shelf software that submits a site to thousands of web sites and presents snazzy reports can do it all. This is so inaccurate and nothing can be further from the truth – it takes a tremendous amount of labor and time to identify keyword sets (not just words), optimize the content for these keywords, submit the pages while obeying the rules of the road and then continually analyzing rankings and tweaking to maintain and drive rankings (web site visibility).

Software can certainly help to automate some facets of the process and be used for back end analysis – but you can’t expect any application to make the job easy, there is too much inherent complexity in the processes. And, competition for keyword sets is fierce - some with up to several millions sites for the same keywords.

Myths Four and Five – Any page listing will help to drive traffic to a web site – this is another misconception. If you are aren’t achieving page 1-3 rankings then your wasting a great deal of time and resources – most people never drill down below these pages. Another common mistake is trying to achieve search engine rankings for a specific URL or product – if people know the name of a company or product they will find your web site easily, it’s a waste of resources to optimize for these specialized terms in 80% of most cases.