In Search Of Eldorado: The Hunt For Rank Position One

By Russell R. Collins

If, like me, you have a website that you spend hours of your time developing, you may also be wondering why so few people come across it. It can certainly be frustrating after the effort you invested in it. The graphics look fantastic, the menu makes sense, the text is clear and easy to read, there's plenty of content, and of course the actual product or service you're offering is good. Of course, no one expects overnight success - it takes a little time for the search engines to find you, and unless you've invested heavily in marketing and advertising using billboards, posters and so on, then obviously it will be a while before your site is even found.

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.

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.

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.

So what are these factors which affect the rank of your website? There are many different ways to win over the approval of a major search engine. The big factor used to be keywords, with search engines scanning through the pages on your site and identifying the relevant keywords. Unfortunately, many people took advantage of this and simply inserted great blocks of keywords, whether they were relevant or not, just to grab the attention of the search engines. This technique is more likely to lower your rank these days. One of the biggest factors is how many websites link to yours. Obviously if several hundred sites all have a link encouraging people to visit yours, that tells the search engines that your site must be pretty good, and so increase your rank.

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.

About the Author:

No visitors? Listed on page 20? 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 simple it is to have a free evaluation and make your website profitable now.