Here’s the top tip from search engine observer, Amy Munice: Stop!

If you are a search engine optimisation consultant or, like me, one who sometimes receives dozens of emails a week promising a list of best practices to get ‘top search engine rankings’, read on . . .

Please know that any promised lists of best practices to rise to the top in search engines are tantamount to a huge red flag that screams, ‘out-of-date’!

To those who know about how search engines really work, spam doesn’t get much spammier than this!

Just the phrase ‘top search engine rankings’ is a big giveaway that your missive is well-meaning fiction, at best.

There is no one-size-fits-all task list for alleged ‘top search engine rankings’, because every web page and every website exists in a unique, competitive landscape on the web. A website selling outerwear will likely have an entirely different search engine optimisation challenge to a site selling mobile phones.

Indeed, a site selling women’s outerwear does not exist in the same competitive landscape as one selling men’s or children’s outerwear. And, if raincoats are your stock-in-trade, you have different fish to fry than a furrier!

In that way, the web is just like any high street – where it would never occur to the haberdasher and the chemist to cast competitive glances towards one another.

Shocking as it may sound to some, inbound links may not have any bearing on how a particular web page fares to get to the top of a searcher’s list. Conversely, the ‘inbound link authority’ or ‘inbound link title’ may be the only things that have relevance. In all cases, there is a unique and different mix of variables that can be controlled over time that will affect traffic to your site.

Web experts who come armed with a standing ‘to do’ list, gleaned as best practices to get top rankings (ie. an implied reverse-engineering of Google or other search engine algorithms applicable to one and all) are obviously missing the only tools in an Internet marketing toolkit that count: web competitive intelligence tools, including those for:

1. Advanced math-enabled keyword research
2. Search engine optimisers that handle personalised search algorithms
3. Those that use mathematics to take stock of the unique competitive landscape for a given website and the ways to gain visibility that are not clear to those without search engine optimisers.

All that spam suggesting the key to top search engine rankings, screams to me the senders don’t know that localised search algorithms will make my site appear in Honolulu in quite a different place than it will in London, web-wise.

Likewise, those spammy emails tell me that those sending them also do not take note of personalised search algorithms – which shuffle the deck to know that I like sites of a certain type while others favour a different type.

Taking another tack, how could anyone possibly reverse-engineer a search engine which is changing every day – or more accurately, every minute, or less?

Every time a person goes to search for something on the web, he or she creates a trail of history for web crawlers who feed on this ever-growing database. These web crawlers hope to fine-tune natural language processing – a sibling of computational linguistics – so that they can be better at being us: people who type into the search bar and along the way buy something from an advertiser (helping the search engine company monetise its efforts).

This makes the World Wide Web a very dynamic place. So dynamic, in fact, that if you could successfully reverse-engineer all the web’s algorithms today, your mathematical model of the web would be obsolete tomorrow.

This doesn’t mean you can’t compete on the web. Quite the contrary – you must compete on the web with everyone else who is trying to get attention. You just won’t get anywhere if you think about the web in static terms. It is a constantly-evolving entity and the ONLY things that will give you a competitive edge are mathematical tools that deliver insights on how the web – or the tiny portion of the web where your site pages live – is shaping up.

The second and last tip is on how much you have to do to compete.

You only need to compete as little or as much as it takes to be better than your competitors. If you are lucky enough to have competitors who are not web savvy, you may need to do little. The web landscape is always shifting and there are many variables at play: for example, Google recently reported it has about 200 factors that affect search outcomes. Which means that how competitors stack up one against the other is never a linear process. A site can literally jump from a Number 30+ position to Number 1 overnight, or vice versa, if it has better mathematical tools at work gleaning insights on how to compete with others in a similar landscape.

So, take these two tips to heart. De-tox your search engine optimisation strategies from any/all conscious or unconscious attempts to reverse-engineer search engine algorithms and you will get on track to compete and win.

Amy Munice (pictured)  is president of ALM Communications Inc PR firm and web marketing information and tools source Global B2B Communications. Email: info@globalb2bcommunications.com