EMCS.net

"Doing business on the Internet since 1994" is actually our current tagline and it is true. We started offering the Internet to our clients in late 1994 as a Dial up Service Provider and shortly after that we started serving websites. Back then the internet was the Wild West and you could do anything to improve your websites search rankings. The search engines just cataloged your website for every word that was in the code.

I had a website designer that wanted to increase their traffic so they placed white text on a white background at the bottom of each page with every word they could think of that related to website searches. The words had nothing to do with their products, they were just looking for the traffic. The more traffic they could show coming to their website, the higher they could price their design efforts. Remember I mentioned the comparison to the Wild West, well this designer would be one of the guys wearing a Black Hat. Not long after this practice came to my attention we parted ways with this designer. They actually joined forces with another design group he became their Website Traffic Expert. I am sure that later on he became an SEO specialist of some sort.

Well, Search engines came and went and they got smarter. They no longer cataloged every single word and they looked for things like matching foreground and background colors, they started to add more weight to websites that had incoming links from other websites. Now it didn't matter what type of website was linking to your website, it just added value. So the "Black Hats" started to create massive amounts of links to their clients websites. Pool Supply websites had links from businesses that had no relationship whatsoever to the pool supply business. They could be pet food suppliers, Winter clothing retailers, porn sites and for every link came additional weight to their sites.

Time goes on and the Black Hats keep coming up with new methods for moving traffic to their clients websites. Here is a list of a few of them, you can "Bing" them for more information. Duplicate Sites, Doorway Pages, Redirects, Keyword Stuffing, Cloaking and the list goes on and they find new ones as the search engines find the holes.

Search Engines are battling the Black Hat tactics but are they going to the dark side too? Now I believe in free enterprise and entrepreneurial endeavors but there is a point when it can turn wrong. I speak about building a brand on impartial placement of listings and then do a 180 and make it "Pay to Play" to list products in their Shopping Search Engine. The small business has no place in their new products area. The "Cost Per Click" which they say averages to $0.40 per click is not a terrible cost until you figure out the number of clicks it takes to sell a product. If your product has a sale price of $4.00 and costs $1.00 to acquire and the percentage on click s is 20%, which is 5 clicks to sell a product then your $3.00 profit just turned to $1.00. You will get other sales on the same click, maybe, or maybe not. According to Internet experts in the CPC industry Google Shopping is in the 2-3% category on conversion rates for Clicks. Lets go to the high side and say 3 % and use their $0.40 average bid cost, so 33 1/3 clicks per conversion at $0.40 is $13.34 per sale. On a $4.00 item that leads to a sale of 4-$4.00 items in the cart, you lose $1.34 on the sale after accounting for the acquisition cost.

When Microsoft took up the SCROOGLED chant were they thinking that it was for Scrooge or Screwed? It works both ways, though I find it ironic that Microsoft, the dominant force in controlling the PC Operating System Market for so many years, would choose this method to fight for market share, who remembers Amiga or IBM OS/2? I see the Search Engine turning into the Operating System of the future. I can only hope that we have learned from the past and we will keep our options available and not allow one company to take total control.

Keep all of the Search Engine URL's in your shortcuts and use them on a regular basis and if they are all fighting for the market share they will improve their offerings instead of putting on their Scrooge hat and giving us the Screw!