So you are on the search engine, what next?
The first thing to remember about websites is that there are an awful
lot of
them out there. Take any typical search term and look at the number of
potential web pages that match your term and you will often find many
thousands if not millions of pages listed. Google
(one of the popular engines) searches a database of over two billion pages
to bring you results.
I wont go into statistics here but suffice it to say that unless your website is in the top thirty results, visitors are going to be few and far between if you rely upon search engines to serve your site to a potential customer or visitor. Indeed if you really want visitors to get to your site by using a search engine then you really have to be in the top ten results for a particular search to gain meaningful numbers.
So, getting on the search engine is only one stage. Once you are on the search engine how on earth do you get to the top ten?
What you first have to do is ask yourself what getting in the top ten means?
You have a product or service to sell or a website to share information
about your interests. Do you think that people are going to type in your
domain name to a search engine in order to get there. No, (unless you
are
well known) they will use a search word or phrase and if your site doesn't
match that you will not show up in their results.
Be specific.
For example you sell doors on the Internet. You THINK that someone is
searching for 'doors' and therefore you MUST be at the top for 'doors'
in
www.google.com and you spend all your effort trying to achieve this.
If you try this search on www.google.com, you will find 6.4 million other
sites relating to 'doors'. Yes, someone has to be top but you do need
to
reduce your competition. Think about this also, if you search for doors,
you might actually be looking for the pop group. People using the search
engines quickly realise that they must use more than one word to find
what
they are looking for, for just this reason.
It is much better then, to try to achieve top ten placement for a more unusual phrase. Try 'bathroom doors' on Google.com and you will find that suddenly there are now just over 600 thousand sites and therefore it will be easier to get to the top ten. Add in a 'uk' to the end of that takes you to only 68 thousand sites available. If your product is specialist or on sale in a limited geographical area, being specific will also provide you with much more defined hits that are more likely to result in an order or request for quotation.
Don't guess what people are searching for.
The other problem is that as potential visitors are not likely to already
know who you are, you have to know what they will search for. You can
guess but this is likely to lead to failure unless you are lucky.
A good example is with a recent customer of mine who sells water softeners on the Internet. He thought that he would like to be top for 'limescale removal' on the Internet and on the face of it, this would seem a good guess. However, upon investigation we found that even an unusual phrase such as 'consumer reports on water softeners' was searched for many more times a day than his guess of 'limescale removal'.
Getting a top ten position for a phrase is hard work so don't waste your
time on phrases that will only bring in small numbers of hits once you
get
to the top.
Luckily, there are utilities available for finding just this and it is one of the most valuable assets in your website promo strategy by taking away the guess work and actually knowing what people are searching for.
Not only that but you can gain statistics for how many times a search phrase is used on an average day and how many sites there are competing with you should you wish to try for a top placement. A good measure (should you wish to do this manually) is to add commas around a phrase for an exact search of a phrase. Blue secondhand cars will bring up any sites that have any of these words in, but 'blue secondhand cars' will show you how many sites actually have that phrase on their page somewhere and these are the ones that you are most likely to be competing against.
All copy rights and trade marks acknowledged. E.& O.E. This is a free information site, we take no responsibility for the use of information given on this site. You may not copy information from this site without our written permission. Please do not use the site if you do not agree to these terms.