241543903 or How The Internet Really Works
241543903
This number can teach you a lot about internet marketing.
When you want a site to rank well in organic search results, you focus on certain keywords, and then try to create as many inbound links to your site as possible. You do this by sharing content across the internet, including backlinks to your site. Hopefully you create quality content, and other people also link to you. The more quality links point to your site, the better your search results.
This is an oversimplification of the process; search engines (especially Google) use very complex algorithms to rank sites, and the actual secrets of those algorithms are known only to a small handful of people.
However, there are many examples of this working in real life. One of those examples is 241543903. I don’t know how this started, but at some point people began taking photos of themselves with their heads in a freezer, posting them to the internet, and tagging the image with 241543903. If you do a search for this number, all of the search results will result in images of people with their heads in a freezer. Try it, I’ll wait.
This tactic is called a “Google Bomb”. There are many other examples of Google Bombs on the net, which you can explore at a later time. You might think this is just a silly thing, but it does have real world uses. If your product or service has relatively unique keywords, you may find that you can easily rank extremely well for those keywords.
There is some danger here, however. Unscrupulous marketers and sketchy SEO people will often promise their customers first page results in Google. What those poor customers often end up with is a first page Google result for an obscure keyword that very few people are looking up. Other unsavory internet types will use what is known as ‘black-hat’ SEO, which is essentially creating thousands of garbage links to your site so that you rank well. This can work in the short term, but the search engines will catch you. When they do, they often manually remove you from their database. Yes, that means you will not show up ANYWHERE in search results.
The takeaway is this: great content means people will link to you. A wide presence on the internet means more people have access to you. In time, the traffic will come. Don’t be greedy.
