Why focus on Search Engine Rankings?

Just to be clear at the beginning let me just explain why search engine rankings are so important to your Internet marketing business.

The simple fact is that most people looking for information on the Internet will start with Google, Yahoo or Bing and search for what they want. If your site is about mountain bikes and you can get your site listed on the first page of Google for the keyword ‘best mountain bike’, then you are going to get between 10-40% of the 50,000 people a month who search for that term visiting your site. All for free.

This is the reason why I love search engine rankings and why they form the centerpiece of how I drive traffic to my websites. Sure there are plenty of other ways of doing this. Indeed many very successful people currently swear by the use of Facebook.

Whilst I wouldn’t put you off using Facebook, I believe that good search engine rankings will get you to where you want to be much quicker and with less work that using social networks. Also once achieved, good search engine rankings don’t need to be maintained daily, indeed they tend to mature over time. I am no expert, but I don’t believe this is the case on Facebook, where you need to stay visible and up to the minute.

I much prefer the Passive Income model. It goes something like this, Build a relevant website with quality content. Set up the SEO correctly. Work on it and nurture it for a a while. Leave it to receive loads of free traffic from the search engines. Check in from time to time and tweak if necessary. Rinse and Repeat.

Working this way you can realistically have tens, hundreds of websites all active, all relevant at any one time. I could be wrong, but my hunch is you would struggle to keep 100 Facebook fan pages going at any one time.

 

How does google rank a page?

If you are new to SEO (and even if you know a fair bit about it) it is useful to hear it from Google themselves how they go about the process of ranking pages and returning relevant results in less the a second when you type a request into their search engine.

 

 

 

 

 

The Main factors that will effect your search engine ranking

From Matt’s video above, and with a little lateral thinking we can come up with a list of 3 main factors that are going to effect how Google views you site, and one further factor that taken with the other 3 will determine whether you can appear on page one or not.

 

  1. Content - Make it original and relevant. Oh…and lots of it.
  2. Links - If you have great content, you will naturally start to get links. If you want to help that along a bit then make sure you do it naturally and get good quality links. Try to avoid spamming loads of low quality links. Google know what spam looks like, and will punish you.
  3. Time - Google like a good track record. Expect to take a bit of time to get to top spot.
  4. Competition - Hopefully this is obvious. Its much easier to rank for ‘How to collect paper cups’ than it is for ‘Make Money online’. If the reason why is not apparent to you, then maybe this game is not for you.