I’m taking care of a friend’s cats while he’s out of town. While I was leaving his apartment, a stink bug flew at me and attacked with extreme prejudice and unmitigated ferocity. OK, I’ll admit that it was probably just trying to find someplace to land peacefully, but my head is not as bug-friendly as it may look.

I began flailing my arms about in desperate defense, ultimately relying on the plastic bag in my hand as a weapon against this cruel stink bug berserker. You may remember that I am taking care of cats. The plastic bag, which I was taking to the dumpster, was not empty.

During the melee, I noticed the neighbor woman watching in amusement. Stink bug: 1. Tom’s dignity: 0. Eventually, the stink bug landed on the door, and I fled the scene.

You may be wondering what this has to do with search marketing. Sadly, this incident is like so much that’s going on right now.

Google, a perennial source of ranking mayhem, has recently updated their algorithm causing many sites to lose rank on key pages. A natural reaction is to swat at these competitor stink bugs by doing what you’ve always done. If this doesn’t work, it can turn into a frantic swatfest of title tag tweaking and copy rewriting.

Search marketing is evolving. Old strategies that once gave you an edge are now standard operating procedure, which means that you must have your SEO fundamentals down pat.

Optimization, especially B2B SEO, is most definitely a long term strategy. Developing lots of great content and building solid links are the two fundamental long term strategies that must be the focus. However, this is evolving. In addition to the content you create for your site, you also need to build resources that you publish on other sites. These should have links back to your site (when possible), and they should always have value to the audience.

Ranking will always fluctuate. Ultimately, if you’re approach to search marketing involves proactively implementing a long term strategy, you’re on the right path. If your approach is reactionary, you’re basically swinging cat poo.

Tags: Google algorithm, long term SEO strategy, SERPs, stink bug

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 3:53 pm and is filed under google, search engines, search marketing, seo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.