Many webmasters dabbling in the occult art of search engine marketing are reductionists. They focus on the immediate goal of their marketing campaign and forget about the indirect effects of their efforts. That’s a mistake.

The main objective of any search engine marketer is to make a web-page or a whole site rank higher in search engine results. This is normally done by three means:

The three basic tactics for search engine ranking

1. By writing more content-rich quality pages.
2. By tweaking the content of the web pages themselves (including keywords in the title-field, in the headline etc. etc. — see our tutorial for more details).
3. By getting more relevant inbound links to the pages in question.

Success is then measured as higher rankings and more visits caused by those search engine results.

But this does not give you the whole explanation for why some web sites succeed, while others fail.

Search engine marketing spillovers

Parts of the explanation is found in what we will call search engine marketing spillovers.

It goes like this:

The three main points listed above are important and essential. However, they may under the right conditions start an avalanche of effects that will help your site achieve search engine success.

To give you one example:

You get one inbound link from an influential expert site. Yes, it does have a high PageRank and by giving some of that juice to you, you do get a small boost in the search engine result pages. However, that is not the most important effect.

This expert site is read by others, and several regular readers of that site write blog posts about you. Some of their readers again bookmark your site using one of the online bookmarking sites, leading other surfers to discover your site.

One of these readers adds your RRS feed to his feed reader. Three months later this person recommends one of your well written blog posts to digg, which leads to some 150 leads from that site, out of which one reader is an influential journalist writing for one of the largest US newspapers.

An article in that newspaper leads several university researchers to link to your site from their .edu sites giving you an additional boost in rankings, and new leads from the science community. One of those scientists include your blog in her blogroll….

A neverending story

OK, this is the dream scenario, but you get the idea. This process may not end until you close down your site.

Much of it is out of your control, but if you deliver the necessary input, i.e. a useful site with well written content, other people out there will work for you, for free.

Out of the sandbox

Much of the so-called Google Sandbox Effect, i.e. the fact that it will take time for new sites to rank well even if they have a lot of valuable content, may be caused by a lack of spillovers. It takes time for a site to build enough pages and a large enough group of regular readers for this effect to take place.

The more linkable pages you have, and the more visitors, the greater are the chances that someone will start an avalanche of the kind described above. Which means that out of the three tactics described above, the first two will always be important.

There comes a point, however, when you can stop writing emails to webmasters in order to make them link to your site. They will find you on their own.