To get visitors to come to your website from the results of a search engine, your listing needs to be close to the top of the first page of results. But since many search terms produce hundreds of thousands of results, sometimes millions, how can you outsmart all the others who are trying for the same thing as you?
The answer is that in minor niches the web pages holding the top positions often have have not had high quality search engine optimization and other promotion techniques applied to them. They are there only because the other pages have received even less treatment to achieve good positioning.
You can get some idea of your chances of getting to the top by seeing what Google page rank the leading sites have. The way to find out the PR is by loading the Google page rank tool bar which you can find with an internet search using those keywords. It’s a free download. When you have it, you will see a small green bar which extents to the right if a web page has a PR greater than zero. When you hover your mouse cursor above the PR box, numbers appear showing the rating out of a maximum of ten.
Basic, amateur web pages will have no score and the heavy hitters like Google itself and a few other sites which get massive traffic, such as youtube.com and statcounter.com have PRs of ten. For most busy commercial sites five is a good score. If a small business get a score as high as this they are definitely doing something right.
Now you have some idea of the values that are to be found, check out the PRs of sites at the top of search results for the keywords that you are focusing on. If you find that the top site, for example, has a rating of four and the ones below it have two or perhaps even zero, then it won’t be very difficult for you to get a high position for your page, if you do the right things.
Although Google keeps its algorithm secret – that’s the process or formula which they use to score a webpage – some factors are known. You can read what Google has to say on the subject in the Google Webmaster Tools help files – just put in those words as your search clue to find this. Google’s main objective is to give users search results which are useful to them. The word that they use over and over to describe this is relevant. It’s easy to forget how far we’ve come in search engine quality. I’ve just been using a primitve search engine on a site which sells books. It was instructive to see just how hopeless their search engine is. For the terms I searched on, hundreds of results were produced yet I could not find what I wanted.
You must make your pages content-rich, full of on-topic material. But by experiment and observation I have discovered that it is not necessary to have very long pages.
The other very important factor is to have inbound links from other web pages with good page ranks. There are several ways to obtain these; your pages may have such interesting and useful content that people make links from their site to yours. It’s nice to get such links, but you have no control over whether you will, nor the timescale. It’s most unlikely to happen quickly.
You can offer link exchanges to the webmasters or owners of other sites. If each site offers something interesting for visitors coming from the other one, you may get agreement to this.
The method which offers the greatest degree of certainty – and is free, is to write articles on relevant themes and submit them to article directories. These pieces can contain hyperlinks to your website. Because the main article directories have high page rank, the links you have embedded have a strong leveraging effect and will raise your web page’s page rank.
One problem is that Google does not react very fast to efforts in this area and you may not see the results for some weeks or months. But you can multiply the effectiveness of the article submission strategy by uploadng to multiple directories. Search on article directory to find them. Check their PR before you submit – you always want a link from locations with higher PR.
Some effort across the two areas of relevance and acquiring high-quality inbound links will pull your page rank up, and with it your positioning within the search results.
If you submit lots of articles, varying the keywords you focus on within your subject area, you can keep adding to the sources which send traffic to your website. It’s only a matter of persisting, it costs nothing and is worth the effort because the first two or three results listed get many times more clicks than the ones lower down.
For inspiration, go to a major article directory and look at the number of contributions by the top authors. You are in for a surprise, the figures are enormous, hundreds, even thousands of pieces. If it didn’t work, they wouldn’t have bothered, so get started.
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Robert Seviour is a sales trainer specialising in business development for technical companies.
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