Search engines make billions of dollars each year selling ads. Most search engine
traffic goes to the free, organically listed sites. The ratio of traffic distribution is
going to be keyword dependent and search engine dependent, but I believe about
85% of Google’s traffic clicks on the organic listings. Most other search engines
display ads a bit more aggressively than Google does. In many of those search
engines, organic listings get around 70% of the traffic. Some sites rank well on
merit, while others are there due exclusively to ranking manipulation.
In many situations, a proper SEO campaign can provide a much greater ROI than
paid ads do. This means that while search engine optimizers—known in the
industry as SEOs—and search engines have business models that may overlap,
they may also compete with one another for ad dollars. Sometimes SEOs and
search engines are friends with each other, and, unfortunately, sometimes they are
enemies.
When search engines return relevant results, they get to deliver more ads. When
their results are not relevant, they lose market share. Beyond relevancy, some
search engines also try to bias the search results to informational sites such that
commercial sites are forced into buying ads.
I have had a single page that I have not actively promoted randomly send me
commission checks for over $1,000. There is a huge sum of money in
manipulating search results. There are ways to improve search engine placement
that go with the goals of the search engines, and there are also ways that go against
them. Quality SEOs aim to be relevant, whether or not they follow search
guidelines.
Many effective SEO techniques may be considered somewhat spammy.
Like anything in life, you should make an informed decision about which SEO
techniques you want to use and which ones you do not (and the odds are, you care
about learning the difference, or you wouldn’t be reading this).
You may choose to use highly aggressive, “crash and burn” techniques, or slower,
more predictable, less risky techniques. Most industries will not require extremely
aggressive promotional techniques. Later on I will try to point out which
techniques are which.