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SEO is undisputedly the best method for generating traffic and profits. That being said, you need to understand the inherent conflict that can arise with SEO.

Conflicting SEO Expectations

SEO is both the technical effort and art of getting your site ranked highly in search results on Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are two competing factors in the effort, time and volume of traffic, which can lead to clients having unreasonable expectations.

The conflict giving rise to misunderstood SEO expectations deal with keywords. Obviously, an optimization program is designed to get you high in the rankings on various keywords. The problem, of course, is the more traffic a keyword produces, the higher the number of sites competing for rankings under the phrase. Inevitably, this translates to a longer period of time required to get top rankings.

Obviously, most clients want to obtain top rankings as quickly as possible. The best way to do this is identify those keywords that have decent traffic, but few sites competing for rankings. In such a campaign, clients see results relatively quickly, but they have fallen into a trap. Even if they go into the number one position across the top three search engines, they have limited the amount of traffic they can receive. This leads to frustration as revenues are effectively capped.
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A few weeks ago, I presented myself with a challenge – to do some Internet sleuthing and get to the bottom of this perplexing condition that newly search engine optimized websites (that’s SEO) face known as the Google Sandbox. At times this endeavor made me empathize with Captain Ahab chasing his white whale, but unlike Ahab, I’m not going to meet a watery grave today. ICMediaDirect.com provides SEOs with life jackets – so I got that going for me, which is good. The obsession to confirm, pin down, and counteract the effects of this Sandbox is proving as difficult and elusive as any whale hunt I’ve ever been on.

Before explaining to the uninitiated just what the Sandbox is exactly, or what it’s purported to be, it warrants mentioning that Google officially neither confirms nor denies its existence. So from the word “go” we wade into mystery. We’re forced to consider the Sandbox as either a modern quasi-myth of the Computer Age or an actual no man’s land created by Google where SEOs are pitted against the machine. Kinda cool, right? This would be a limbo, an undesired waiting room for web properties seeking quality recognition from Google’s Search Engine Results Pages are, as I like to say, unSERPable. Incidentally, the stakes are very high, too, since higher rankings mean increased revenue.

The effects of the Sandbox are not in question. Websites listing with Google are simply beat down in their rankings for no apparent rhyme or reason, thus leaving the afflicted with no avenue of redress but time itself – no magic linking is known to spring sites out. (Though it’s whispered that influential friends at Google can pull favors.) New websites and overhauled existing websites (often reworked, ostensibly, for better rankings) are its primary “victims”. It was first noticed or acknowledged in October, 2004. No one outside of Google knows exactly how or why sites are Sandboxed.

Here are some Sandbox basics: it only happens to English speaking websites; it is a “.com”-only phenomenon, no “.edu”s, “.us”s, or “.org”s need worry; it could last from weeks to a year before release into deserving results rankings; its effects are seen with Google only, so you can rank high on Yahoo and be in the Sandbox (or even rank poorly – I have little info handy on poorly optimized websites mired in suspected Sandboxes); the Sandbox is by no means universal and not automatic. It’s a crapshoot.

There is a minority of SEOs who think that the Sandbox is the end result of better algorithms and not and specially created punishment. Believing, as I do, that Google has the best search results, this isn’t implausible.
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