Guerilla Internet Marketing

SEO 10 years ago, how easy life was back in the old days… Why was it easy, well, there weren’t so many rules, there wasn’t even close to the amount of competition, and more importantly, there were a lot fewer people who even knew what search engine optimization was. It was an exciting time when people with little to no money could setup a site and have a viable business, without the typical barriers to entry that business entrepreneurship normally brings with it. Let’s take a look at some of the techniques used back then to see how much the game has changed…

Keyword Stuffing
SEO was pretty much all about keyword stuffing. Anywhere you could fit them, you put them. META tags were a big factor, as was the on page density. Often you would see sites with huge blocks of hidden text (same color as background color) stuffed to the gills with keywords. Also used were comment tags, ALT tags, or even plain blocks of visible text with keywords-a-plenty. There wasn’t a lot of competition back then or spiders that were as sophisticated as there are now, so people targeted every keyword they could think of on the homepage. Now we need to target at most a few keywords per page because of the extremely competitive environment we are in now, but back then things were a lot easier.

Doorway Pages
People talk about landing pages now, usually in the context of PPC campaigns, but back then people would create what was called doorway pages, which were basically nothing but keyword stuffed pages with little to no real content. They were written purely for the search engines, and usually just had a big ‘Enter’ link somewhere in the middle of the page. Back then you had to manually submit each page to the search engines, so this would give you a shot at getting multiple pages in the first page of search results. Often with a little know how, you could get half or more of the first page results of most of the search engines. Again, most people put no thought into SEO and there was much less competition, even in the sheer number of sites that were around.

Submitting to the engines
XML sitemaps, what are those??? Back then, it was a manual process, one by one, for each engine and each page. There were also a lot more players in the industry. Since then, so much consolidation has occured in the search industry, with many companies swallowing up the smaller players and now we only have to worry about a handful of engines. Back then there were sites like Webcrawler, Altavista (the original Google ), Hotbot, Lycos, Yahoo (when it was free and you got listed fairly quickly…), OpenText, Magellan, Excite, Northern Light, etc. etc.

Eventually there were services like Submit-It! where you could submit your site to multiple engines with one click, but all in all it was a laborious process that needed to be repeated for each page and also repeated periodically to ensure your site was re-indexed.

SEO Elements
As I mentioned earlier, it was all about keyword stuffing. Back then, the META keywords tag was a big factor unlike now when they are largely ignored. Title tags and page names were largely ignored by most webmasters back then. This is why the word ‘home’ began being ignored by search engines because the title tag for most sites read ‘Home Page’ or some variation! It also wasn’t out of the ordinary for pages to be named index, index2, index3, etc.

Newsgroups – the original social networking
Back then, there were no blogs, social networking sites, video marketing, etc. About the closest things there were to that was newsgroups. They were topically focused message boards that required news reader software and you could post and respond to topics. This was a supplemental way to market sites back then, but eventually became so abused that newsgroups became havens for tons and tons of spam. Initially though, it was a nice place to get the message out, and search for topics and messages related to your industry where you could respond with helpful advice.

Site Design
There are still many sites now that are designed on a shoestring budget by people with little to no design abilities, but back then, the Internet was rampant with horrible looking sites that were difficult to use. Remember when many sites adopted the teal background color – was that really an upgrade from the grey??? Sites were also littered with animated GIFs, ‘under construction’ signs, etc. It wasn’t a pretty sight! Things progressed from there to getting ‘plugin crazy’ with technologies like Shockwave that required numerous downloads and long loading times, during an era where broadband Internet access was practically non-existent. This led to Flash which did offer quicker loading times, but to this day is often abused with entire sites designed in Flash, splash pages with long introduction movies (still see these on some sites today), which obviously do nothing for SEO or usability for that matter.

Analytics
Analytics, often referred to as web stats back then, were very basic. Webtrends was the golden child back then, which required downloading the server log files locally where they would be analyzed and the data would be compiled into reports. There were some web based statistics programs back then, but they all worked off the server log files which provided very limited data. Back then everyone would talk about ‘hits’, but they all had their own definitions of what a hit actually was. Some counted every file access (including images), and some used the term hits to refer to visits or visitors. Now we are more worried about ROI than anything else, which involves tracking conversions, conversion rates – quality traffic. This was an impossibility back then.

Times have changed…
As you can see, times were simpler then and top rankings were much easier to achieve. Now, sites are competing with a much larger volume of competitors, and for most industries, the competition is not just large, it’s well educated. Internet marketing agencies have become very successful in the past few years as businesses large and small see the value of the Internet, and the competition for visibility getting fierce. There is definitely a science to Internet Marketing now, and while not an exact science, it requires skilled professionals who can not only market the site, but dissect it to ensure it is easy to use, converts at the highest rate possible, and has a decent design that doesn’t distract from the goals of turning traffic into sales or leads. It’s not easy now, but the war is certainly a lot more interesting!