I have created quite a large number of websites, and if, like me, you have spent hours building yours, then it can be a thankless task when it comes to waiting for customers to hit your virtual door. Like any overnight success, it can take weeks or even months for your website to start to gain popularity unless you have the benefit of advertising in other areas, such as banner adverts, posters, flyers and so on. For the average site builder, the date of publication can come and go as though all your hard work has made no difference to the value of the internet.
by Russell R. Collins
I have created quite a large number of websites, and if, like me, you have spent hours building yours, then it can be a thankless task when it comes to waiting for customers to hit your virtual door. Like any overnight success, it can take weeks or even months for your website to start to gain popularity unless you have the benefit of advertising in other areas, such as banner adverts, posters, flyers and so on. For the average site builder, the date of publication can come and go as though all your hard work has made no difference to the value of the internet.
After a while, of course, people do start to stumble across your site, and maybe you get one or two orders. This could encourage you, and you start to wonder how many you might come to expect over the next few days or weeks. With regret you start to accept that making your first million by Christmas seems somewhat unlikely. You may start to wonder why, since at least some people have started to find you, you don’t have more people coming. But thinking about it seriously, what have you actually done yourself to ensure that your site attracts visitors? It’s all very well having a site that is so good that people want to stay and buy, but they need to know it exists first.
One thing that you may have done is to browse through the internet and find information on how to promote your site, or tips on ‘optimizing’ it. You are almost certainly aware of the fact that to be successful on the internet you really need the search engines on your side. Having your site listed by Google, MSN and Yahoo for example is going to make a big difference to your site. But, what will make a far bigger difference is the overall rank of your website.
When someone carries out a keyword search for, say ‘empty egg timer’ and you just happen to sell these handy devices (useful for those who don’t have to worry about how long anything takes) then you will need your website to be right at the top of the list, so that people will find you easily, and come looking to buy from you. On Google alone, a keyword search for ‘empty egg timer’ generates nearly half a million websites! That means that there are approximately 50,000 pages of results. Incredibly, only 3% of people ever look beyond the first page of results, which means that 499,990 websites will be missed, and only 10 sites seen by 97% of visitors! You can see just how important it is to make sure you’re on that first page, and preferably at the very top of the list. If your website is on page 2, it might as well be on page 49,999, since almost no one will ever find it.
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.
Be very wary of those sites that suggest that the best way of getting your site noticed is to use keywords. Although this is certainly true, search engines now take the number of keywords as only a minor factor in judging a site’s rank. Search engines got wise to the fact that many website owners were simply cramming great blocks of keywords into the code of a page just to get attention. They get attention now all right - and the result it that they lose their rank position very quickly. There are many other ways now which the search engines use to judge how good a site is, one of which is its popularity. This is measured in several ways, but the most significant is how many other websites are linking to yours. The more links, the more popular, and this in turn implies more relevant and useful.
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.
Knowing what your site does well, and what it doesn’t, will help you go a long way towards getting your website listed higher. I have a site which was hardly visible at all in Google’s results - even I got bored trying to find it. After spending a couple of days implementing a few very simple changes that made very little difference to the way the site appeared, I resubmitted it to Google. I checked it earlier today, and it’s now ranked as number one! It’s a niche market, but even so, it’s now the first site people reach, and more and more people are finding it and spending money, which is great! For two days’ work, it was well worth it. I’d certainly recommend you get your site checked out; from my experience it really made a big difference.
About the Author:
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