Online Marketing: The Rules about Following the Rules

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Commentary by Israel Rothman
By Israel Rothman

RISMEDIA, March 9 ? One of the Top 10 most common misperceptions in search engine optimizations is that by following all the rules you?ll get to the top of the search engines, or in the first page results for your chosen key words.

What we refer to as ?organic? first page results (un-paid-for results on search engines for chosen key words) is impossible to achieve by conventional means because to be seen, your Web site must stand out among many millions of similar pages.

You must read between the lines: millions of other people taking the same approach means it won?t work.

More and more, these and other common methods, like constant submission, are completely outdated. It is a site?s popularity or what is referred to as ?importance? that matters most in achieving high results, because it is the hardest thing to fake.

It is downright difficult to get thousands of unique users on a remote site to build constantly updated, re-submitted (but not over-submitted), properly optimized pages that contain every conceivable combination of related key words in every reasonable order, including all common misspellings and common typos, to link to your Web site, which, must also be optimized, updated and popular in other ways. We are able to do this by giving away free Web site ads and auctions in sponsored categories, which do this difficult work for you.

The problem is that everybody has what we call a ?Cousin Vinny,? who supposedly knows all about Web design and who hands out confusing misinformation in an already chaotic and unregulated market.

Just as you cannot get home with a used car without someone saying that you paid too much for it when they don?t even know the basic information necessary to form an educated opinion?the ocean of conflicting viewpoints on Web design is very frustrating and expensive for the novice.

The most reliable source of information is the current page recognition status of a potential SEO vendor?s customers. Scrutinize any guarantee to make sure it delivers organic results in a desired search?not just submission or search engine recognition under your proper name (which is easy to do), but actual results. Then, ask to see results for another search in your industry, which brings as many documents up on Yahoo! or MSN as does the search you desire. Then ask them to guarantee specific results for specific searches for words that you choose on specific search engines, at least MSN and Yahoo! (Google is used less and less because it filters the searches, skewing results).

We will discuss this in more detail throughout this 10 part series on the common mistakes in online marketing. Until then, consider this:

To understand the solution, you must first understand the problem. For best results, following the crowd may not be the way to go. Your site must be linked to other popular sites, contain new content and links and be resubmitted appropriately. We?ll discuss this in more detail in the coming weeks.

Israel Rothman is the CEO and founder of Ads for Free, Inc. and HitMyPage.com. For more information, visit http://www.hitmypage.com

or www.rismedia.info.

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