In Search Of Eldorado: The Hunt For Rank Position One

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.

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.

You may have come across websites or companies encouraging you to let them work their magic on your site, so that you can see it float rapidly to the top of the pile, and become number one by next week. You may also have tried implementing a few tricks yourself to get your site ranked higher. I have certainly come across many hundreds of rogue companies that claim to have the single biggest secret of the internet, something which no one else can possibly know or achieve, that will have your site dancing and singing at the top of the search results in no time. Possibly with little flashy lights all round it, a couple of dancing girls and some jazzy music playing in the background. The truth is that there simply is no one single way of getting your site to the top of the list, and in fact no guarantee that it ever will. There is a whole range of tactics, some of which have more effect than others, it's true, but all of which need to be employed to have any real chance of making a difference. It's also important to be aware that your site will not become the number one keyword result overnight - it can take days, weeks or more likely months.

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.

Once you understand what can be changed about your site to help improve its position, it's obviously up to you what you do. Picking and choosing at features that you can easily apply will certainly help. Over time, you can start to implement more of these suggestions, and little by little you should see a difference. I've done this myself - I used to be a keyword freak and just include as many as I could think of, but it started to make no difference. I'm trying things now such as amount of text per page, position of text on the page, number of links I include and so on, and I can see the increase in rank each day. My advice to any website developer is to keep a tight grip on your wallet and don't pay companies to fob you off about magic solutions. Try a valuable free assessment today, it will pay dividends in the end.

By: Russell R. Collins

No site traffic? Buried on page 10? If you want to be found by Google and the rest of the major search engines, you need to have an optimised website. Find out how easy it is to have a free evaluation and make your website profitable now.

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