The Fisherman SEO Analogy

This used to be the main analogy that I used to try and explain SEO to end clients, however in truth it is extremely basic and therefore if you understand some Internet marketing then you could well take offense to this! However it does fit extremely well and hence is well worth a read.

Imagine a fishing man fishing, its not hard and there are few people in the World that wouldn’t understand this as visual concept. For the purpose of this analogy the key points are the bait, the rods, and the fish.

The fish are of course the visitors or your potential customers if you run an online store. This fits extremely well as fishermen go out to catch fish, in the same way that Internet marketing aims to catch visitors or customers.

You may or may not know that often fishing men will have multiple rods in order to catch fish? The obvious logic for this is that every additional rod that you will have will increase ‘your chances’ of catching fish. Now within this analogy a rod is to be considered a link. Of course a link is a possibility that the end user will click it and visit your store, so hence this does work quite well.

Now to take a look at the bait which within this analogy is akin to Anchor text keywords. Now this could be considered a technical concept hence I shall explain this a little. The anchor text for a link is the text that you can read, e.g. the text on which the link is based. Now just like normal bait whilst fishing, this is absolutely key. If you were to put an old boot on a line and try to catch salmon you would no doubt catch very little. This is same as anchor text. From Google’s eyes the anchor text is extremely important as it helps or dictates how google will index your site with the search results SRP.

Taking the above then, if you want to try and get found using the keywords “internet marketing services” then you should  and try and get as many links using the anchor text “internet marketing services” which may or not be possible.

Now it also follows that if you put a non-relevant title (anchor text) like bait (e.g. cheese which does not taste link cheese) then it will not be that effective in terms of catching fish or in this cases visitors.

That is basically the analogy in question. So if you are asking if getting a new whizz bang reel or maggot holder will catch you more fish then the answer in simple, no. The same follows for SEO; these are main the elements that will boast you up the Google index.