Competition
In June 2008, VeriSign reported that there were about 168 million domain name registrations across all of the top-level domain (TLD) names. According to another survey, conducted by Netcraft in April 2009, there were approximately 231.5 million websites across the globe. Although these numbers are staggering, it is likely that the true number of all websites is even higher. As each domain can have numerous subdomains, websites realistically number somewhere in the billions.It’s almost inconceivable that you are the only person in your niche. At the same time, many sites don’t do any SEO, and so it’s relatively easy to gain mindshare and search engine rankings, particularly if you are serving a niche market.
No Guarantees
Nobody can actually guarantee the top spot on Google, Yahoo!, or Bing. It is simply impossible to do so. Though many have certainly tried, too many variables are involved. However, the benefit of SEO is real. If you do your SEO due diligence, rankings and popularity will come in time-provided you have relevant content. Many sites are taking advantage of SEO. It would be foolish not to utilize SEO as part of your overall online marketing strategy.
Ranking Fluctuations
The motive of any business is growth. If you don’t grow, you could be in trouble. This is especially the case with businesses that depend solely on their websites for revenues. For some, the Internet is one way to expand and increase their business. For others, the Internet is their lifeline and the core of their business model. With tens of millions of domains all competing for popularity, trying to stand out in the crowd can be a daunting or even frightening prospect. With continuous improvements in search engine technology, search engines are using hundreds of different ranking factors. Sometimes all it takes is for one factor to change for your site to sink in the rankings or (even worse) be wiped out of the index completely.
Although nobody knows the exact ranking formula, each search engine has its own take on ranking factors. “Positive” ranking factors aid your rank. “Negative” ranking factors (such as having duplicate content) penalize your rank. The positive weights would represent the factors aiding your rank, while the negative weights would represent the factors working against your rank. The cumulative total (of all weights) would represent the relative rank weight that search engines could use in establishing the relative page rank for a particular keyword.
Time Factors
Each site is different, so the SEO strategy applied to each site will also be different.There are so many factors that it would be naïve to put an exact time frame for SEO to show desired results. SEO is not finished when you start seeing results. Even if you get to the top spot on the Google searches that you care about, your job isn’t done. You need to make sure you stay on top of these searches. Your competitors will want to take your top spot away from you. SEO fosters the natural, long-term growth of a website, and once you achieve its benefits, there is usually a ripple effect where you’ll be getting traffic from sources other than search engines by means of other websites linking to yours. If you have the content or product that people want to see, it is only natural to attract inbound links.
Organizational Structure
Organizational structure can play a significant role in SEO. Big companies can sometimes be difficult to navigate. It may be unclear who is responsible for SEO. Having no ownership typically means no work gets done. Smaller companies can be faster paced, but also carry their own troubles. Big companies and organizations Although big companies have large marketing budgets, they too can benefit from receiving (almost free) hits. When it comes to large departmentalized organizations with marketing (or e-business) and IT departments operating in isolation, it can be difficult to adopt a common SEO vision. Typically, large organizations have complex, dynamic websites. In these cases, marketers depend on IT (usually web development and infrastructure teams) for publishing their content, for site maintenance, and so on.
Most software developers or web server administrators do not think about SEO. Most marketers today employ SEM (PPC) and do not know all of the technical details of SEO. This is where a bit of education and training is essential. Forming virtual teams comprising members from each department can help solve these problems. This is often necessary because the best SEO is attained from expertise derived from multiple disciplines.
Adopting an early strategy and identifying roles and responsibilities can make a big difference. Most developers are not proficient copywriters. Most marketers do not understand what the HTTP response codes are. Sometimes an in-house approach may not be the best choice simply because no in-house expertise is available. Even when you have in-house expertise, sometimes it is good to get second opinions. Other times your key people may be involved in other projects and you just don’t have enough resources.
Large, complex sites
Industry giants can run hundreds of different websites with millions of web pages. Having so many web pages (typically) manifests many unique challenges. Some of those challenges include:
• How to optimize many thousands or millions of pages
• Poor indexing of deep pages
• Determining which pages are preferred entry pages
• The quality of most inner pages
• Duplicate content
• Making changes to many pages at once
• Archiving
Small companies and individuals