The Difficulty In Ranking Well

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, June 2, 2009 Comments (2)

There are few guarantees in life. Search engine optimization is one of them. Try as you might, you’ll hardly find any consistency in the way the search engines rank web pages. That makes it rather difficult to predict how they will react to yours. But what makes it so difficult?

A number of factors, actually. For starters, every search engine have their own ranking criteria. Some place undue importance on meta tags while others don’t consider them at all. Some consider keyword placement in the URL while others don’t. Some are based largely on link relevance and quality while others emphasize on-page optimization methods more. It’s a mixed bag of nuts.

To top it off, each search engine consider a large bevy of ranking factors for every page. Type any combination of search queries into any one of the search engines and you are likely to find the top 10 spots for a key phrase populated by different sites that rank for different reasons. None of them will have gotten to their place of prestige in the same way and for the same reasons. So unpredictable.

If all of that is the case then how can one ensure that one’s site ranks well for the key phrases you target? Well, you can’t. Just like spiking the kool-aid, search engine optimization can often lead to uncertain behavior. You just don’t know what will happen when you toss that bottle of vodka into the jungle juice.

Well, we’re not all drunk, but I hope you get my drift. It can sometimes feel like you’re dancing with a room full of drunks. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go to the party.

Every SEO consultant or firm has a unique style and emphasizes different methods for obtaining rankings. You have to do what works for you. Perform your own tests and conduct your own experiments. Then keep doing those things that work.

Comments (2) Category: SEO

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2 Comments

Comment by Mike

Made Thursday, 4 of June , 2009 at 11:41 am

I love the drunken party analogy.

I’ve come to the point where I only worry about optimizing for Google, which seems to meet most of the ranking criteria for Yahoo and MSN. Until the new Bing, or some still unknown competitor comes along, I only consider there to be one major search engine and a few wanna-be’s. Scary really…

Cheers!

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Thursday, 4 of June , 2009 at 12:56 pm

@Mike – Yeah Google’s dominance is very scary, but not if you embrace change…thanks for the comment!