Success on the Internet

This is the 6th in a series of blog posts about Search Engine Optimization, if you haven’t seen the earlier articles in the series, check out our archives section on the right hand side of this page.

When you do a search for a keyword phrase in your favorite search engine, it will usually tell you how many matching pages contain the phrase you searched for.

For example, by typing the phrase “elvis collectibles” in quotes, returns the first 10 of 40,300 results in Google today. Without the quotes around the phrase it shows that there are 798,000 results.

The question is: do you have to worry about trying to beat 40,300 competitors, or 798,000? The answer, in my way of thinking, is neither. I would want to just worry about beating 10 of them, specifically the 10 that show on the first page of results. And it wouldn’t be the end of the world if I just started out by beating half of those 10, to be honest.

On the other hand, if I can beat 40,000 competitors, but not the top 300, it doesn’t do me a bit of good!

So the goal in search engine optimization should be to determine what the top ten are doing correctly, and either match or beat them in that regard, in relation to the factors that contribute most importantly to your search engine ranking. Those factors are on-page content (primarily making sure that the keyword phrase is in your title tag, meta description, H1 tag, URL name, and page text), and off-page content (inbound link quantity, quality, and anchor text).

How important is the last paragraph to your business? Let me put it this way. If you are #301 of 40,300, you’ll be just about as successful as #40,300. You can probably say the same for #201 and #101 also. How often do you bother browsing to the 11th page of search results for something you typed in?

SEO involves simply (sure!), first of all getting your page crawled, and then making sure it is optimized so that the on page and off page content mentioned two paragraphs earlier are spot on. An understanding of this concept puts you ahead of the bottom 40,000 pages. An ability to perform those tasks will put you on the first or second page for just about any search phrase, except for the most competitive of them. It’s just that most web page authors currently just don’t have a clue about how to rank well. If you do, good for you, it shows you care about your visitors enough to make it easy for them to find you.

By the way, our site is currently #7 of 798,000 without quotes, and #4 of 40,300 with quotes for “elvis collectibles”, as I write this post. And it’s a fairly new page, so it’s quite a feasible task for anyone with the understanding and desire. Where we are when you look can vary, results go up and down daily or more frequently, there is always some fluctuation, but once you get to the first page or two, you’re in the game.

It’s my desire to teach you how to rank a large number of your pages on the first page of search results. We have thousands of pages in our site, it would be a daunting task to determine where each targeted keyphrase ranks, and no one, even the experts, can land on top for every phrase they target. The ability to know how to rank higher for important key phrases can make or break your business.

Additionally, once you “get it” in terms of understanding what search engines are looking for, if there is a particular page that’s important to you, you may be able to improve your results dramatically, simply (thare’s that word again!) by researching what the top ranking competitor is doing, and try to match or beat.

Of course, if CNN is #1 for your phrase, with their PR of 9 and 110,000 backlinks at this moment, perhaps you should target another phrase (or settle for #2 or #3).

See you next time, until then, go out there and see what you can improve on your pages, it can be well worth it.