Lack of Answers Leads to Strange Mojo

In some African villages people don't have access to medical care. They have "absolutely no idea" what causes diseases like aids, so they do what seems rational to them. One of the methods they have for curing aids is to sleep with a virgin girl.

As ludicrous as that may seem to you and I who know about the virus and how it is transmitted and ravages the body, it is not ludicrous to them. It is what makes sense to them.

Similar reasons fuel people to make equally irrational assumptions about why their sites are not ranking well.

The blame falls on:

• the sandbox
• their outgoing affiliate links
• the search engine's desire to force webmasters to PPC programs
• search engines favor sites that are in their PPC programs
• search engines punish sites that are in competing ppc programs
• search engine greed
• search engines favor scraper sites, but hate sites they link to
• flavor of server sites are on (supposedley MSN favors MS servers)
• certain niches are closed off so the search engines can profit from them themselves
• their site is underoptmized
• their site is overoptimized
• search engines favor corporate sites
• search engines favor mom and pop sites
• search engines favor irrelevant sites
• their site should be number one because it is not optimized
• their site should be number one because it is optimized with quality white hat tactics
• their site should be number one because the backlinks are honest reciprocals arranged with quality websites
• The ultimate litmus test for search engine relevance is whether or not their site is number one, period.

A better approach is to do some searches and study the results. Look at what people are doing and how they are doing it.

• Spider those sites and get KWD averages.
• Look at relationships between the first two or three results, then look for patterns in positions four through ten, or break them down even more, as in finding relationships between positions four through seven, and seven through ten.
• Do a backlink check for the top ten websites for several different serps and note any patterns (anchors, banner links, ros, etc. use your imagination)
• Open up a tab on a spreadsheet just for header tags used across a range of serps and note any patterns.
• Study the BS results. The serps containing results that don't obviously belong there are a clue to the way the search engine ranks a site for that particular position and helps understanding that particular component of the algo
• Open up a tab on your speadsheet for notating word counts for each site in the top ten, across a range of serps (one with navigation included and one without)
• Open up a tab on the spreadsheet to note what kind of navigation (images or css) is being used by the top ten across a range of serps- again, as in all tests, look for patterns to develop within a range within the top ten
• Notate the average amount pages in a website within the top ten across your set of serps
  

Guesswork doesn't count. Putting sincere effort into understanding what you are looking at will help you understand and internalize what you need to do to get your website ranking better. The search engine engineers have done their homework, so should you.