In the 90’s the mantra was ‘If you build it, they will come’ and indeed for a period of time that was true. Build a web site, spend 15 mins telling the the search engines and Directories of the time about your web site, and sit back and wait for the money to roll in!
This model did not last long and by the early 2000’s a new word hit the Internet vocabulary, SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The basic concept was how do you drive more traffic to your site. This of course is a very important aspect if you are selling ‘stuff’ online’.
By 2002 Google had become the ‘de-facto’ king of the search engines, and the other big names in the game started to enter a long slow death spiral. Google loved to give out free things. The company launched Google News in 2002, Gmail in 2004, Google Maps in 2005, Google Chrome in 2008,
Make no mistake, Google is a ‘For Profit’ company. Early on, they had decided that selling adverts was how they would pay for the ‘Free Stuff’.
This was a genius move.
As Google gained in stature, it also changed the rules of engagement for both advertisers and the web sites that sites that showed them.
Suddenly it was clear that promoting a web site had become a skill. Google had decided that there was entirely too much ‘web spam’ around. Sites that lived within its search engine, but offered no real benefit to the reader. Googles Matt Cutts became the public face of the drive to banish web spam.
I think is is fair to say that Google has done a decent job of dealing with web spam.
If you are selling a product, you need to gain the respect of the ‘AI’ that Google uses.
The days of the Webs Wild West are long gone. If you want to be successful at selling ‘stuff’ of the Web you need an ecommerce marketing agency for help of what to do to make your product sell
