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How Can A Website Break Into The Top Ten? |
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| By Bill Platt |
There is one thing most website owners would agree upon and that is they would all like to be at the top of the search engine results for the search terms that will drive the most traffic and consumers to their website.
In many respects, search engines are like the children?s game of King Of The Hill where only one person can be at the top of the hill. Similarly, only ten websites can be on page one of the search results. When a new website moves into the top ten another must be removed because for any given search term, at any given time, there are only ten web pages on page one of the search results. Subsequently, there are potentially millions of web pages that do not make page one. Unfortunately, these sites will only catch a few stragglers, if any, from the search engines.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an industry that has sprung up around the concept of helping their clients improve their rankings in the search engine results. When you talk to SEO professionals they generally point to a two-pronged approach to search ranking optimization.
The difficulty with on-site search optimization is that you must cater to multiple audiences on your website.
A web page that draws good search rankings is useless if the web page cannot convert the human visitor to a buyer. Many website owners get caught up in the process of optimizing a web page to get it to the top of the search results whilst forgetting that the human visitor knows where the back button is in his or her browser. Once your visitor has hit the back button they will go to someone else's website and buy from them instead of you.
Most website owners have the alternate problem. They consistently convert a significant number of visitors to buyers, but they have to rely on various forms of paid advertising to get visitors to their websites due to the fact they do not rank in the search engines.
I recently spoke with an individual who spends hundreds of dollars ? possibly thousands - per month on pay-per-click advertising to get targeted traffic to his website. He said he consistently earns back his money, but he was still looking for a better way to get ranked in the search engines and therefore joined my client list.
According to the search engine companies there are more than one thousand calculations that determine how well a website will rank in their search engine result pages (SERPs).
The Google engineers are fond of saying that if you build your website for human beings instead of search engines, then, your website should rank well in their algorithms. To a certain degree this is a good strategy.
Think about how magazines are constructed:
The Table Of Contents shows story titles, brief descriptions, and page numbers telling you where you can find a story.
On the story page the title will be in a bold large font. Sometimes, the magazine will include a brief blurb about the story in italics or font that is a bit bigger than the story font. Pictures support the story with captions that further develop the story by describing the picture. Major subsections of the story have their own subheadings. And, the primary body of the story is in regular plain text with only an occasional bolded or italicized word or phrase.
By analyzing the title and other large text on the page a person who is flipping through the pages of a magazine can quickly assess the story content and make the decision as to whether they want to read the full story. In essence, this is how the search engines analyze a website's content to decide which web page will best serve their users' needs.
Since the inception of Google, as well as recently with Yahoo and MSN, the number and quality of links pointing to a website play a significant role in determining how well a web page will rank in the search results.
I have heard people suggest that as much as 75% of the value given to a web page in the search results is based solely on the number and quality of links pointing to a web page. I tend to believe a more conservative number (50.1%) applies.
To prove this point, type "click here" without the quotes into Google, Yahoo and MSN and check the Adobe pages that come up in the search results: Number 1 in Google, #2 in Yahoo, and Number 1 in MSN. When you pull up those pages, search the page to find the individual words "click" or "here" in the text of those pages. They are not there. This has happened because millions of people have linked to these Adobe pages with the embedded anchor text, "click here".
Next, let's analyze those specific web pages from the perspective of each of the search engines:
On Google's top result they show 31 inbound links total for that web page. But, Yahoo claims that there are more than 12 million links to this page. That is a huge difference.
On Yahoo's #2 result: MSN gives 32 links, Google gives 15,000 links, and Yahoo claims it has 700 thousand links! That is another huge difference between the link counts from the search engines.
On MSN's Number 1 result: MSN shows a strong link count, but still nowhere near Yahoo's 2.9 million links. How, then, does a web page with zero links in Google get a PageRank 8?
What Do These Numbers Mean?
Google has always said that they will never show us all of the links that we have pointing to our websites because anything we can see in the public search results our competitors can also observe. So, for me it really is no surprise that we cannot see all of the links that point to Adobe pages, or for that matter the links we have created that point to our clients and ourselves when querying the search engines.
Also, the sheer numbers of inbound links do not rule the roost. Google's Number 1 result (PR8) is actually shown in Google, before Yahoo's #2 (PR10) result.
Recently, a fellow who works as a SEO "professional" told me that be believed my link building system was a sham.
I showed him that on the top 51 keyword phrases we use to market our original commercial website we had 11 number one results, 31 top five results, 34 top ten results, 47 top thirty results, and 51 top 100 results within the Google search results. Additionally, it was shown that only three of those results competed with fewer than one million search results according to Google with the remaining 48 pages competing with one million to 533 million pages.
My detractor spared no effort investigating Google in trying to track how it was possible for me to have accomplished what I claimed. He finally concluded that since Google would not show HIM how I was able to rank so well in their search engine results that I must be fabricating the results.
According to Yahoo we have over 12,000 links from third-party websites. According to our site statistics we received traffic from more than 16,000 unique web pages during 2006. And yet, Google still swears that we only have 42 inbound links to our website!
My detractor concluded that since HE could not prove through Google how I was successful in getting good search rankings, then I could not have accomplished such results by the methods I claimed.
Of course, he is a SEO ?professional? and HE would know???
Bill Platt has been involved with link building since 1999 for his own promotion and for search engine marketing purposes, and he has been doing it professionally for clients since 2001.
* Article rewritten by Octopius
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