Designing and building a website can be a thankless task. You spend hours of your time planning, designing and creating the whole site, carefully assembling it into a work of digital art. Having lovingly pored over every word and put heart and soul into a decent navigation system and a well thought out layout, you eagerly publish your site and hold your breath for the torrent of visitors. It is somewhat disappointing, therefore, to find that days can go by without a single hit. You know that it can take a while for the search engines to identify and crawl your site, but as the days crawl by it can become very disheartening.
But once you can see a trickle of people starting to dribble through to your website, you may wonder why it isn't a torrent. Perhaps next week? Or next month? You start seeing your creation as an investment rather than an overnight sensation that will see you retiring by the end of the month. Clearly people are starting to find you, and perhaps you have had a few comments or a few orders, but what else have you done to try to improve the popularity of your site and the overall number of visitors it receives?
You may have spent some time thinking about the keywords used throughout the pages of your site, since you are almost certainly aware of the fact that these will help the big search engines locate your site and evaluate its relevance. Clearly being listed on Google is a significant step, but this in itself is in no way going to guarantee a flood of eager customers desperate to part with their cash. What matters more than being listed, is where you are on the list.
The rank of your site refers to how far up the list of results your website is when someone searches the internet. If your website sells left handed calculators for example, then you will expect and hope that if someone enters the keywords 'left handed calculator' in a search engine that your website is near the top. If it is at the top, that is fantastic, but you really need to be in the top ten, on that first page, to be a success. Unbelievably, only 3% of people who search online ever look past the first page of results that a search engine brings up. That means that if they search for 'left handed calculators', which brings up almost 400,000 results in Google, you need your website to be high up the first page to stand any chance of someone finding it. Even being in 11th place out of those 400,000 will mean that you're missing out on 97% of visitors.
So what is it that helps you get to the top of your keyword search rank? Is there a single big secret that many SEO companies are aware of, and will only tell you for a huge fee? Certainly many companies do seem to suggest that they alone have the answer, and that only by going through them will the Golden Secret be revealed to you, and suddenly your site will rocket to the top. In fact, there are three things wrong with this. Firstly, there is no single solution - it's a combination of many varied factors. Secondly, no one single company can ever offer guarantees, promises or assurances that your site will be at the top, or near the top - they can try, and almost certainly your site will rise, but this depends on other factors beyond anyone's control. This might, for example, be because your website is in a mass market, such as insurance. With hundreds of thousands of keyword competitors, getting near the top is a huge endeavour, whereas if you're selling rainbow coloured light bulbs then there is likely to be much less competition, and so more chance you'll rise more quickly, and further. The third thing is that any rise is never going to be overnight, and any progress can take weeks, if not months or even years.
Some of the factors which will influence how well your site is ranked include keywords. Search engines scan the documents that make up your website, and catalogue the keywords which occur within it. This helps them to judge the relevance of your site compared to others and to keyword searches. It used to be relatively easy to reach the top of the search results simply by inserting hundreds of keywords all over your site. This now no longer has the effect it did, and there are many other factors which have much more influence. How many people link to your site is a big factor - obviously the more people linking to you, the more popular your site, and the more credibility is gains in the eyes of the search engines, and so your site will rise up the ranks.
There are many free things available on the internet, and many good services that cost money. I rarely come across a good service that I'd recommend, which also happens to be free, but if you're a website owner like me, and are interested in knowing how your site's doing as far as the search engines are concerned,it's great to find a free service that offers interesting and valyable information on how you're website is ranked in the major search engines. As the work is done manually, the results are very thorough. Of course, they'll offer to do the work for you, but if you've already built your site, the chances are that you'll be quite happy making the changes they recommend.
It can often be quite obscure little changes that you wouldn't think of - such as the position of the text on the page, the number of menu links and outside links you have, the length of your sentences and so on. Knowing what you can do to help get your website noticed is a massive step toward getting up towards that golden first page. I have a number of websites, and I can't say I have always tried every single bit of advice, but even by applying a few which suit me, I have noticed that my sites are climbing higher. Don't forget, no one ever gets overnight top rank placement, and your eventual position will depend largely on the number of keyword competitors you have, but I'd certainly recommend getting your site checked out, after all, it's free!
But once you can see a trickle of people starting to dribble through to your website, you may wonder why it isn't a torrent. Perhaps next week? Or next month? You start seeing your creation as an investment rather than an overnight sensation that will see you retiring by the end of the month. Clearly people are starting to find you, and perhaps you have had a few comments or a few orders, but what else have you done to try to improve the popularity of your site and the overall number of visitors it receives?
You may have spent some time thinking about the keywords used throughout the pages of your site, since you are almost certainly aware of the fact that these will help the big search engines locate your site and evaluate its relevance. Clearly being listed on Google is a significant step, but this in itself is in no way going to guarantee a flood of eager customers desperate to part with their cash. What matters more than being listed, is where you are on the list.
The rank of your site refers to how far up the list of results your website is when someone searches the internet. If your website sells left handed calculators for example, then you will expect and hope that if someone enters the keywords 'left handed calculator' in a search engine that your website is near the top. If it is at the top, that is fantastic, but you really need to be in the top ten, on that first page, to be a success. Unbelievably, only 3% of people who search online ever look past the first page of results that a search engine brings up. That means that if they search for 'left handed calculators', which brings up almost 400,000 results in Google, you need your website to be high up the first page to stand any chance of someone finding it. Even being in 11th place out of those 400,000 will mean that you're missing out on 97% of visitors.
So what is it that helps you get to the top of your keyword search rank? Is there a single big secret that many SEO companies are aware of, and will only tell you for a huge fee? Certainly many companies do seem to suggest that they alone have the answer, and that only by going through them will the Golden Secret be revealed to you, and suddenly your site will rocket to the top. In fact, there are three things wrong with this. Firstly, there is no single solution - it's a combination of many varied factors. Secondly, no one single company can ever offer guarantees, promises or assurances that your site will be at the top, or near the top - they can try, and almost certainly your site will rise, but this depends on other factors beyond anyone's control. This might, for example, be because your website is in a mass market, such as insurance. With hundreds of thousands of keyword competitors, getting near the top is a huge endeavour, whereas if you're selling rainbow coloured light bulbs then there is likely to be much less competition, and so more chance you'll rise more quickly, and further. The third thing is that any rise is never going to be overnight, and any progress can take weeks, if not months or even years.
Some of the factors which will influence how well your site is ranked include keywords. Search engines scan the documents that make up your website, and catalogue the keywords which occur within it. This helps them to judge the relevance of your site compared to others and to keyword searches. It used to be relatively easy to reach the top of the search results simply by inserting hundreds of keywords all over your site. This now no longer has the effect it did, and there are many other factors which have much more influence. How many people link to your site is a big factor - obviously the more people linking to you, the more popular your site, and the more credibility is gains in the eyes of the search engines, and so your site will rise up the ranks.
There are many free things available on the internet, and many good services that cost money. I rarely come across a good service that I'd recommend, which also happens to be free, but if you're a website owner like me, and are interested in knowing how your site's doing as far as the search engines are concerned,it's great to find a free service that offers interesting and valyable information on how you're website is ranked in the major search engines. As the work is done manually, the results are very thorough. Of course, they'll offer to do the work for you, but if you've already built your site, the chances are that you'll be quite happy making the changes they recommend.
It can often be quite obscure little changes that you wouldn't think of - such as the position of the text on the page, the number of menu links and outside links you have, the length of your sentences and so on. Knowing what you can do to help get your website noticed is a massive step toward getting up towards that golden first page. I have a number of websites, and I can't say I have always tried every single bit of advice, but even by applying a few which suit me, I have noticed that my sites are climbing higher. Don't forget, no one ever gets overnight top rank placement, and your eventual position will depend largely on the number of keyword competitors you have, but I'd certainly recommend getting your site checked out, after all, it's free!
About the Author:
No visitors? Listed on page 10? If you want to be found by Google and the rest of the search engines, you must have an optimised website. Find out how simple it is to have a free evaluation and make your website profitable now.
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