THE LATEST, GREATEST SEARCH ENGINE TRICK!
by: Cary Christian

Are you salivating yet? Can't wait to get your paws on this one? Dying to see the look on your competitors' faces as you race past them in the rankings?

Well, forget about doorway pages, search engine cloaking, link farming, hidden keywords, and just about every other trick you've ever read about. Most of them won't do you much good. Many of them will get you banned by the search engines.

Many require you to manage multiple domains. Others require you to know a lot more programming than you care to know or else hire someone to do it for you or purchase software that accomplishes the task.

So what is this trick I'm talking about? How about honesty? That's right, honesty. So simple. So pure. So hard to come by online. So valuable when found. So powerful when used.

Some marketers will tell you that total honesty can be a tremendous handicap in business. But when was the last time a customer ever said that? Search engines represent your customers. When dealing with a search engine you ARE dealing with your potential customers, for the search engines are how they find you.

Did you know that 94 percent of Internet users in the US use search engines to find what they're looking for? And did you know that 81 percent of them ALWAYS find what they're looking for when they use the search engines? When they reach your site you want to make sure you're giving them exactly what they expected when they clicked through. Otherwise you're wasting a lot of bandwidth and tarnishing your image.

So how does one go about using honesty to get top rankings in the search engines?

It's simple really. In my opinion the basics of Internet marketing provide you with all you really need to succeed. Tricks and fads come and go and your competitors can use them, too, erasing any temporary advantage you might find very quickly.

But the one thing that's hard to overcome is excellent quality content. That's honesty. "This is who we are, this is what we provide, and this is how our products can help make your life easier and more enjoyable." Use your creativity to provide excellent content rather than apply the latest "trick" to your site. The only way your competitors can beat that is to come up with even better content. That's the way the Internet SHOULD be.

The search engines will reward good content. They always have and always will. In fact, you cannot get a listing in the Open Directory without good content.

Don't think for a minute that the people running the search engines aren't aware of the tricks being used to get top rankings. They read, too, and people who develop these tricks just love to write about them. The end result is that the useful life of one of these tricks is very short.

Take your site one page at a time. Think about what you want to say on that page. Write the content without thinking about search engine rankings. Just concentrate on writing the best content you can come up with.

Then, simply optimize the page using basic search engine optimization techniques. Your content will dictate the keywords you use to describe the page. Your content will dictate the title of the page. Your content will dictate any links that are appropriate. If it's a small site, your content might even dictate the domain name. Once you're done you have a page with great content and with all the meta tags accurately describing what that page is all about.

That's honesty.

And there still isn't a trick in the book that beats it long term!
 

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