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There is something that needs to be addressed, in most cases you will find posts on this blog of the educational type, and at its heart this topic is also meant to teach. This post deals with the very real obstacle people who sell search engine optimization must deal with, and as potential customers what you will need to understand as well.

To guarantee or not to guarantee results?

The reality is many search engine optimization companies are faced with the decision of whether or not to provide a guarantee on their services. Innately, clients feel more comfortable when they are offered a guarantee and you’ll close more business that way; however, the reality is—you can’t really guarantee anything and here’s why:

1.    We cannot know what your competition is doing
2.    We cannot know what search engines will do
3.    We cannot predict search volume accurately (long term)
4.    We cannot predict market demand (long term)
5.    We cannot  know exactly what timeline your site will be on

Expanding On These 5 Points

At the end of the day, it’s just too difficult to know exactly what is going to happen. We can make our best guess, but that’s all it really is—money back guarantee is just a calculated risk based on several assumptions.

When we say you cannot know what your competition is doing, that is true for the most part. You can look at certain aspects, monitor their site, and get a pretty good idea what their overall strategy is. The safest decision we usually make from looking at competition is simply whether or not it looks like they’re doing anything online at all.  Usually it’s pretty clear who is and who isn’t.  Though most businesses at least have a website—often times that’s about it.

The second, and most obvious, point is that we can’t know what the search engines will do. As internet marketers we are charged with the task of understanding as much as we can about certain search engines—and what they like and dislike. That said, we do not control the search algorithm and it’s impossible to predict. The best we can do is follow best practices and react when things change.

The last three points are all more about our inability to definitively see what the future will hold. We can use previous numbers, industry traffic trends, and make professional assumptions. To get a better idea, here’s an example: Let’s say you had a website about Swine flu. You’ve hypothetically owned it since 2001, had lots of information on it, had a great url, and some decent links. Now fast forward to spring of 2009, swine flu hysteria strikes and your website is getting a million hits a week. The influx of traffic wasn’t dictated by SEO; it wasn’t about anything other than being in the right place at the right time. While this is an extreme example, it still illustrates that we truly cannot know. We can only make our best estimate. An extreme case will always be pretty accurate, but we find that managing our client’s expectations is much easier than making bold predictions and hoping we are right.

Bottom Line

There are simply too many variables when it comes to predicating a sites traffic increase, and in reality, it’s not about increasing traffic in most cases—it’s about increasing the actions you want. If you were trying to generate leads, what good would 10X the traffic be if it didn’t get you 10X the leads or sales?  It is very easy to get caught up in terms like page rank, overall visitors, and time on site—when the real number you want to look at is ROI.  That’s what we focus on!

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. The words you choose in the anchor text can determine the ranking that the page will receive by search engines. Anchor text usually gives your visitors useful information about the content of the page you’re linking to. It tells search engines what the page is about. For example if your car dealership webpage includes a link to an article about “financing your new Chevy Silverado with an APR that won’t balloon,” then your anchor text in the link should reflect those keywords: How to finance a Chevy Silverado without ballooning interest

What Not to Use

If, on the other hand, you use keywords like “click here” or “part 2”—you’re telling people the page is about the subject “click here”. If you use “Part 2″ as the anchor text, your telling the search engines the page is discussing “part 2″. As you can see, Google and the “humans” reading your anchor text will find well-crafted anchor text much more authoritative than “click here for more info”. The point is to make your anchor text authoritative and digestible. If your anchor text incessantly rambles, it may be a good indication you need to revise: How to go about finding really, really awesome financing deals for your brand spanking new Chevy Silverado so you won’t have to put your kids up for adoption next month and your wife will still love you Know too, to keep your actual links relevant to the content on your page. If you have a car-dealership webpage then make sure your links are about car-related topics and not about World of Warcraft! Here’s some key place to be including anchor text:

• External links - links from other sites
• Internal links - links on your pages’ Navigation maps
• Links on your main page

The Benefits The benefit of wisely using authoritative anchor text is it boosts your rankings in search engines, especially in Google. If you’re wondering why Google would even care about something like this when considering page rank—they do! Here’s why: The inclusion of important keywords in the anchor text can make a big difference in the final ranking of your site pages because search engines give significant weight to the anchor text on your pages. Google has a special operator: “allinanchor:keyword’, which picks up text only from within the anchor text of indexed pages. This further implies that Google’s algorithm is configured to index anchor text as separate query-able data, thereby making it evident that Google considers anchor text to be a key indication of page relevance. Our internal research leads us to believe that weight given to anchor text has been raised recently in the Google algorithm. With these changes, it is possible to enhance your website’s ranking by using the right keywords in anchor text. Bottom Line

• Yes, Google cares!
• Use anchor text and links that match the content of your webpage
• Make sure your anchor text is both authoritative and digestible for humans and search engines
• Use the right type of links

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I have had the pleasure recently of being a part of a call with Internet Marketing Guru Dr. Glenn Livingston. I wanted to share the conversation with you. It is a little long but there is some amazing information in there. Turn it on, and just work away, if you have any questions please feel free to email me at support@indieresults.com.

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Learn just a few of the amazing services we can offer. The video is a little long but we wanted to cover as much as we could about our services. We can help your business with everything including but not limited to search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, email marketing, website design, custom wordpress and CRM themes and much more.