Online marketers frequently struggle with the question of how to compete when Google fails to look positively upon a particular website. In this article, I will focus on how to build rankings and drive traffic to your website, using Google and the other search engines.
What Motivates Google’s Algorithm
Over the years, many have tried to claim, even in court, that Google was unfairly keeping their website out of the top of Google’s search results. But, the truth is that Google is not beholden to the needs and desires of the webmasters who want to be on page one of Google’s natural search results.
Instead, Google is beholden to its stockholders and its need to earn profíts. Google has determined that the best way to keep profíts high is to keep Internet users flocking to its websites. Google accomplishes that by giving its users the kind of information they are looking to find, and Google weights its search algorithm towards what Google believes its search audience wants to see in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).It is important for online marketers to understand that it is not always in Google’s best interest for our websites to rank well in Google.How Important Is Google In Search?Worldwide, Google is currently providing 78% of all searches.But in 2007, Google only provided 52% of my website’s total search traffic. Yahoo, Windows Live, Ask, and MSN provided the next 42%. The remaining 6% of my website’s search traffic came from another 55 smaller search engines.On my website, only 48.8% of my 2007 traffic actually came from search engines. The remaining 51.2% of my website’s quarter million visitors came directly from article placements on other websites, recommendations from other people, forum posts, and from people who have bookmarks for my website.
Tips For Ranking Well For Specific Keywords
It has been my experience that it is easier to rank in 1) MSN / Windows Live, 2) Yahoo, and then 3) Google, in that order. Quite frankly, I have always ignored the role of Ask in the search market. While MSN is the easiest search engine to rank in, it only delivered 4.6% of my total search traffic in 2007.I read a question in a forum, where the poster was asking how he could get his website to rank well in Google for the search term, “software”.
The truth is that it is nearly impossible in nearly every search engine to rank well in the natural results for such a singular keyword as “software”. In a nutshell, if you want to rank well in Google, you need to build inbound links (IBLs) to your website with your targeted keywords in the links.
But, you don’t want to put all of your links together with one keyword phrase. One of Google’s red flags is when they notice a link to a particular website appearing more than 60% of the time with one specific keyword phrase.Utilizing a variety of long-tail keywords will actually serve you better in the search-engine ranking puzzle, in more ways than one. After all, when I do a search for software, I don’t type in the search word, “software”. I type in search phrases like: “accounting software”, “small business accounting software”, “windows software accounting small business”, “windows image editing software”, “windows software image editor”, “windows xp photo album manager”, etc.
People searching the keyword “software” have yet to figure out that they are looking for specific kinds of software. Once they do an initial search, they are going to type in more specific search terms to find what they actually want. So, once you start targeting a variety of long-tail keyword phrases, then you will start seeing more success in your search marketing efforts
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Written by Bill Platt, owner of http://www.thephantomwriters.com
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