When I was in high school, I worked at a small internet service provider. Aside from giving me the skills to deal with extremely irate customers, the experience gave me my introduction to the Internet at a very functional level. Starting at a technical level has its advantages, and I appreciate no longer having to troubleshoot old 3com dialup chassis to make sure that Grandpa Jay gets his Yahoo celebrity news.
Bitter much? You bet.
One of the things that we did at the ISP for some of our business class clients (after building web sites and setting up local area networks for their offices) was Search Engine Submission. Before Google had established the dominance that it currently has and before crawling technologies had become as sophisticated as they have today, engines relied on Webmasters submitting their content to be indexed in manual fashion – page by page.
The economy of many engines as opposed to three (and really just two) having majority market share dictates a very different strategy to ubiquitous search engine presence. Fancy speak to say – fewer engines, more focused attention.
Modern engines, as you’re no doubt familiar with, use a much more sophisticated and all-inclusive methodology for indexing the world’s online content – they go out and find it. And the method which engines use to go out and find that content also influences the order in which it is displayed to us peons (i.e. links influence rankings).
<Rant>
This being a story that comes from 12 years ago, you can imagine our nostalgic ire when a marketing company maintains a core SEO service offering of ‘Search Engine Submission.’ I could go into all sorts of detail as to why those very words irk me, but suffice to say - using those terms in a services description is direct evidence that the person writing it has no understanding of the way a modern search engine works, and is not qualified to offer said services.
</Rant>
We believe that any conversation about internet marketing that does not start and finish with the audience of your company or product is the wrong conversation. Too often business professionals are lead to believe that the holy grail in search is filled with rankings and traffic. Wrong. The holy grail is a lifetime customer found through those rankings. Fine line you say? Perhaps in conversation, but in function it’s a huge chasm that can define either success or failure.
Andrew Gouty
CEO – Rella SEO