Part 4: Working your way up the rankings
Often people find that their site is fully indexed in search engines, but they’re getting no traffic from it. Lack of traffic is usually because the search engine has decided that a lot of other sites are more ‘important’ for the chosen search terms than theirs. So if you want traffic, you need to show the search engine that for specific search terms, your web site is the most important. Having crawled your web site, here’s the factors search engines consider when deciding how important you are (in no particular order):
1. How many important web sites link to yours?
Search engines view links as important because if lots of web sites link to you, you’re clearly an important point of reference for a specific ‘subject’, so the search engines bump you up their rankings (hence why for many search terms a Wikipedia page comes top in the search results). What’s more, if the search engines see that ‘important’ web sites are linking to you, that makes you even more important than if ‘less important’ web sites are linking to you. One good link from one important web site will boost you up the search engine rankings better than hundreds of links from un-important web sites. So, if I was to get a link to www.giteguru.com from the homepage of Yahoo.com for a few weeks (you can but dream), my search ranking would sky-rocket.
Google uses a system called ‘Page Rank‘ and you can check your Google page rank to see how ‘important’ Google considers your web site to be. 0 is bad, 9 is amazing (Yahoo’s home page scores a 9 for example), and to get higher up Google’s index, you need to improve your page rank. If you want to check your page rank for any page in your web site, there’s a free tool here: http://pr.blogflux.com/index2.php
I will deal with link building strategies in future posts but will mention in passing that the text used to link to your web page is as important as getting the link itself. So if I wanted to be found for the search term ‘online marketing advice’ I would ensure that that text was the text that was used as a link (called the ‘anchor text‘) by providing the linking web site with the following code:
Get <a href=”http://www.giteguru.com/”>Online Marketing Advice</a> for Gite Owners!
2. How often is your web site updated?
If it’s updated regularly, you’re likely to rank more highly, which is one of the reasons blogs rank highly in search engines. Recency and frequency are both important factors, so why not consider adding a ‘news’ section to your web site which gets a weekly update to improve your ranking?
3. How long has your web site been in existence?
There’s not much you can do about this, but it’s a good argument for getting cracking with a web presence even if it’s only a single page for now. I have a web site that sells cat litter which has been on the net for years. It doesn’t have a massive page rank, but because it’s been around for years, it ranks number 1 for the search term ‘Cat Litter’ on Google.
That’s it for now, I hope this series of 4 posts has been useful, feel free to provide feedback in the comments and any additional thoughts on how your search ranking can be improved. In future I will go into more detail on how to build links, and will also look at paid listings or ‘PPC campaigns’ in search results.
A bientot!
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