You may not be familiar with the name YPO (Yellow Pages Optimization), but you’ve seen it in action.
Go grab your Yellow Pages directory. What is that you ask? It’s that big book full of ads sitting in the closet under the bread maker you always said you’d use. Thumb to a category like pest control and tell me what you see.
The concept of advertising optimization is nothing new. Long before search engines and secret algorithms, all a person needed to know to get a first page listing under their Yellow Pages category was the alphabet. Eventually, somebody figured out that all they had to do to make sure more eyeballs saw their company’s name was to stick some A’s at the beginning of it.
Now, if you want to rank on the first page of say, Google…the old formula was that the more links you had, the more popular you must be and so the higher you would rank. The concept is similar to “Alpha Loading” your company’s name with A’s. The more A’s (or links) you have, the closer to the top you ‘ll be.
So the next time you think SEO is something new, think back to your handy dandy Yellow Pages. As long as there are marketers trying to sell products, there will be marketers who try to game the system whether they be online OR offline.
Tags: Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO
