One important characteristic of an expert and professional consultant is that he or she understands that the theories and techniques in their field are subject to quite concrete and specific limitations. In this page, I review the important ones that apply to search engine optimization and website marketing and their practical significance.
SEO is hand made to order. If you have planned a product launch, a wedding or been a party to a lawsuit, you know that the best laid plans are seldom executed without some major changes. Life is simply too complex. SEO is another one of those human activities because, to be effective, it is hand made for a specific site and business.
There are other important limitations which you need to understand and take into consideration.
Searching is an evolving process from the point of view of providers (the search engines), users and website owners. What worked yesterday may not work today and be counter-productive or harmful tomorrow. In the result, monitoring or regular checks of the key search engines and directories is required to maintain a high ranking once it is achieved.
Quality is everything. Since virtually everything that we do to improve a site's ranking will be known to anyone who knows how to get it, innovations tend to be short-lived. Moreover, search engines are always on the lookout for exploits that manipulate their ranking algorithms. The only thing that cannot be copied or exploited is high quality and value content especially when others link to it for those reasons. Only higher and more valuable content trumps it.
The cost of SEO is rising. More expertise is required than before and this trend will continue. The techniques employed are more sophisticated, complex and time consuming. There are fewer worthwhile search engines and directories that offer free listings. Paid placement costs are rising and the best key words expensive.
The search lottery. Search engines collect only a fraction of the billions of sites' pages for various technological reasons which change over time but nonetheless will mean for the foreseeable future that searching is akin to a lottery. SEO improves the odds but cannot remove the uncertainty altogether.
SEO is a marketing exercise and, accordingly, the same old business rules apply. You can sell almost anything to someone once but businesses are built and prosper through repeat customers to whom the reputation, brand or goodwill is important. Content quality and value is the key and that remains elusive, expensive and difficult to source but, in websites, is the only basis of effective marketing using SEO techniques.
Suffice to say, if your site is included in a search engine and you achieve a high enough ranking for your requirements, then these limitations are costs of doing business in cyberspace.
