It takes a little vision to cure search engine blindness

You're a successful restaurant owner in a busy city centre.You are well located in the heart of 'dining land' which is great because that's where people cluster and decide where to eat; still, it does mean you have to work hard to make your restaurant stand out from the surrounding bistros and wine bars and so naturally you do everything possible to entice passing trade in - from basics like a great menu, through to tricks of the trade, like filling up the window first with diners to maximise that popular and busy look.

And then one day you come to open up - and find that your business has suddenly and inexplicably been relocated to the outskirts of town and the only neighbours you have are the local tip and a tyre-fitter.
Rules of engagement

For an on-line equivalent, look no further than the precarious world of search engine ranking results! All search results are susceptible to a tidal effect caused by hundreds of external factors including new entrants to the market, site re-designs and of course, various forms of search engine optimisation. But the biggest unknowns are the ever changing algorithms, or rules of engagement set by the search engines themselves.

In constantly striving to maintain relevancy and to keep any third party trickery at bay, all search engines regularly update their algorithms. But when you're the biggest in the world and you're Google - the effects are so electrifying that just like a hurricane, pundits give it a name, in this case 'Jagger'. Like 'Florida' before it, an unfortunate side-effect is that for every rogue penalised by Google for supposedly bucking the system, thousands of genuine and well-intentioned websites are caught in the maelstrom and plummet from ranking positions often held for years.

Of course nobody but Google can know for sure exactly what the new algorithms standards are, but the rumours are that it has only just begun and indeed there may well be at least two more stages of Jagger to weather with listings only settling down as late as mid November.

Managing risk

So where does that leave your website as far as achieving, and more worryingly sustaining, commercially viable ranking results? A recent report from Hitwise, the search engine monitoring specialist, revealed that the four top search engines currently power 94% of all UK searches. And no prizes for guessing who takes the lion's share! In fact, Google accounts for a staggering 70% of those searches. Yes, 7 out of every 10 searches are powered by the nation's favourite. And so when a massive reorganisation like Jagger breaks cover, the devastation is awesome. Current forum discussion groups and blogs mention some websites losing 80% plus of first time click throughs through lost rankings in Google search engine results - virtually overnight.

And so what is a business to do about such exposure? Vertical Leap's recommendation is to spread the risk with a managed, comprehensive search engine campaign straddling and exploiting as many search engine opportunities as possible.

In short, it cannot make sense to endure continued exposure on any one search engine at the expense of the others however 'wrapped up' that market at first appears to be.

Look at it from another perspective: no matter where a company is in any given supply chain, from a one-man concern selling widgets to a multi-national ad agency, each will do all they can to ensure that their business is spread amongst a reasonably diverse client portfolio to minimise exposure to any one client. Ideally those clients will also be drawn from different business sectors to offset that exposure even further.

Consider the findings of yet another survey completed recently by Neilson//NetRatings that concluded that approximately 58% of all Google users visit at least one of the other top search engines, MSN and/or Yahoo!

In other words, first page rankings on the two search engines you may well initially discount could give you a 50% extra chance of attracting that all important high ranking and click through.

And given that the main battlefield seems to be located around Google, by offsetting that keyword exposure around MSN and Yahoo, Vertical Leap's experience is that a lower overall click through rate from a smaller viewing audience may still result in high conversion rates with a proportionately higher number of motivated buyers finding your site first.

Powerful link building

The online audience is growing massively every year, but it's interesting that in America Neilsen calculate that with the number of searches carried out online in the first and second quarters of this year rising by 5% the number of searches carried out on Google were 6% up (that's a hellava lot of searches on those numbers) but searches on MSN and AOL rose by 16% and 17% respectively.

And never discard links to relevant websites. In fact Action Pages set to record conversions in Vertical Leap's Search Analytics prove time and time again that site association is every bit as powerful as highly tuned search keywords and phrases. Again, the link building element of a Vertical Leap campaign dilutes your website's dependence on any one search engine or phrase. Results by association are another advantage a managed campaign from Vertical Leap will bring you.

Rounded campaign

Google is a corporate phenomenon. The world's largest media company worth $100bn (£56bn), built from scratch just seven years ago and now seemingly defining search with a host of market shaking innovations being launched and in the pipe-line.

But as every successful restaurateur knows, for the small guy, keeping ahead of the competition is dependant on the quality of food, the range of wines….and how clean the waiter's fingernails are - it's the sum of the parts that combine to make up an effective overall campaign that really counts and not a fixation on any one element.