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On Monday I had a real dummy spit here on Rated Hot about the hordes of Search Engine Optimisation gurus who are out there spreading rubbish and leading people astray. At the very least they're going to waste your time if you blindly follow what they say and they're probably going to cost you a heap of money as well ... but don't think I'm here to rant about them again.

No, I'm not going to rant about them ... at least not for a few more months ... what I want to do today is talk about the testing that you need to do so that you can find your own way through the twisted maze of search engine optimisation.

Now I have to tell you right now that there is no magic bullet when it comes to testing ... you're not going to find a quick solution ... you're not going to do something in five minutes time and have the answer in a couple of hours.

Just lately there has been one or two who seem to be suggesting that answers do come that quickly but that has never been our experience. Instead of instant results it may take days ... weeks or maybe even months ... before you get a definitive answer and you have to be prepared to get answers that you would rather not see. You may also get answers that only lead to more testing.

If you can handle the fact that testing takes time and sometimes you don't get the answers you want then let's look at how to do some testing that will provide us with the truth and not just the "right" answers.

What was I testing?
Because we all live very busy lives and we're gulping down huge amounts of information every few minutes and we tend to forget things the very first step we need to take in our testing is to write down a clear statement of what we're testing.

For example if we're testing whether keyword stuffing works or not we need to write that down and we also need to record what we did to put the theory to the test.

For example we might describe our test as "A test to see if adding the keyword ‘porn' to the text on page.html 20 times increases that page's ability to rank for that word". And then we need to record what we actually did to the text on that page we might record that we "Added the keyword to the first paragraph four times ... to the second paragraph 6 times ..." and so on.

Before, during and after
Now if we're testing to see if we can get a web page to rank better by stuffing it with keywords we need to record where it ranked before we started the experiment. So obviously we keep a record of where that page ranked in each of the search engines for the term we're testing.

Personally we find it very helpful to print off the results pages for the terms that we're testing. Obviously I don't print off every page of the search engine results ... only a few pages before and a few pages after the one where my test site appears for that term. By printing those pages off you have a good snapshot of the search engine results and that can come in handy when you're assessing the results of your testing.

You also need to keep track of the results during your testing and after you've finished your testing too.

Be patient
Recently I was watching a guru do some testing for something that had been obvious to lots of others for years but was suddenly new to him. He started the test and was looking for definitive results within a couple of hours ... ah some people have no patience.

If you're going to do some testing then by all means look for some results in a matter of hours but don't think that if there's a change it's going to be proof of anything. When Steve and I are working on improving our own sites in the search engines we usually don't go back to see what's happening for at least a week after we made the changes. Even after a week we don't rush in to make any additional changes for at least a week after that.

Sure we're living in a world of instant gratification but good things take time to develop so give your testing time to deliver mature results.

Then comes the hard part
Once you've seen some changes that have occurred due to the testing that you've done so far there comes the hard part ... and I have to admit that I don't always do this ... but if you want to be sure that your results are genuine then you've got to bite the bullet.

And while you're biting the bullet you have to undo all those changes you made and return the page to its original condition. Yep ... if you want to be absolutely sure that what you've done really does work you have to undo it all and monitor the changes that may occur.

Once you know that the changes you have observed in the ranking for your web page was due to the work you first did then you can change it back to the way it was during your initial testing.

See ... there's no magic bullet here ... it takes time and you'll need to be patient but once you know what works and what doesn't you can then start making money from what you know.