Two Myths about the Search Engine Listing

 by: Mohamad Zaki Hussein

Getting top search engine listing is perhaps one of the hottest subjects in the internet marketing world. The problem is that many discussions on this subject are based on speculation. Almost no one knows the exact algorithms of the search engines. And what make it worse is that the search engines have a habit of changing their algorithms.

However, some people are so obsessed with top search engine listing that they tend to undermine the importance of other web traffic generation techniques. These "trances" are partly caused by some misleading myths that surround the search engine marketing subject. Below are two of those myths with some empirical facts that contradict and refute them.

Myth #1: "You can't get loads of targeted traffic without the top search engine listing."

This is completely wrong. Jack Humphrey, the power linking guy, has given us a picture that it is possible to get huge amount of web traffic without the top search engine listing. In his Special Report, "What if Google Didn't Exist?," he shared one of his sites' stat in April 2004 and guess what? From 71,444 unique visitors that he got at that month, "google search" referred only a small portion of them, i.e. 0.07%.

You can read Jack's complete report at http://www.webmastertraffictools.com/weblog/index.php/weblog/googleexist/.

I also found another similar fact from Tinu Abayomi-Paul, the free traffic chick. In her blog post, "Site Promotion is Multi-Faceted," she said that the search engines only constitute 6 - 10% of her traffic in any given month. While she didn't tell us about the monthly amount of traffic to her website, I believe that her site gets huge traffic every month, because she has an Alexa ranking of 38,371 (that's what my Alexa toolbar showed me at the time I wrote this article).

You can read Tinu's complete blog post at http://www.freetraffictip.com/2005/06/site-promotion-is-multi-faceted.php.

Myth #2: "The major search engines are reliable sources of sustainable, residual, traffic."

This is also inaccurate. Look at what happened to Alice Seba from Internet Based Moms. One of her websites, http://malcolmsweb.com, has been banned by Google, even though that website was full with good content. Since May 21, 2005, her visitors instantly dropped from about 700-800 per day to 200-250 per day.

You can read Alice's complete story at her blog post, 'Alice "White Hat" Seba Has Been Banned,' at http://www.aliceseba.com/2005/06/alice-white-hat-seba-has-been-banned.html.

Now I don't mean to undermine the importance of the major search engines. The major search engines are one of the biggest traffic sources on the net and so, you should do proper optimization and try to get top search engine listing.

But, don't let yourself be misled by these myths and thus ignore many other web traffic generation techniques. With the unstable nature of the search engines, it would be wise to use the search engines only as one of your traffic sources and look for other traffic generation techniques to build multiple sources of traffic.