Keywords and Your Website Rankings

Can You Be Found In The Search Results?

When your prospective customer searches for something online, they normally use their favourite search engine, like Google, Yahoo or Bing. They type in a ‘keyword’ – the ‘product or service’ they are looking for and the search engine will automatically display a list of all the websites that match their search phrase. This all happens within seconds, or even nano-seconds.

• What do you want your customer to type in, to find you?

• This is where search engine optimization for your targeted keywords, plays an important part in your website rankings.

It’s really quite impressive as to how this works. The search engines use ‘spiders’ or ‘bots’ which are programs that scour the internet and index the content of websites.

The results are stored in databases and are matched to the web browser search queries. These results are displayed in the lists appearing on the search result pages, either the first, second, third page etc.

• Search engines claim to provide relevancy, so ideally the higher the result in the search, the more relevant it is to the specific search.

• However, search engines also allow advertisers to pay to appear in enhanced positions for the targeted keyword.

• This is their business model, the major search engines are not a community service!

Each search engine follows its own algorithms (formulas in software programs) for searching the Internet and finding relevant web pages for the user. Each of them has a unique method for ranking the sites according to relevance to the keywords in the search. No-one knows exactly what these algorithms are, as they do not give out that information. This is so website owners cannot manipulate their search engine rankings.

They also change their algorithms hundreds of times a year, so it would be impossible to be one step in front of them. A whole sub-industry has arisen which tries to, claims to and sells methods to increase ones standing in the search rankings.

• The Holy Grail is to ‘get on the front page of Google’ for any particular search term, as Google is the largest and for most, the default search engine.

• YouTube is the second largest search engine! (Who owns YouTube? Google…do you have a Google+ account or appear in Google Local Listings?) If not…contact me quick!

Ranking on The First Page

Everyone has their own techniques for trying to make the front page of the search results. It is very important to be high up in the search rankings for whatever search term your intended customers will be using. The front page is where the action is and most searchers don’t bother clicking through to subsequent pages.

• If your website appears on the front page of a major search engine for a relevant buying term, you will have visitors clicking through to your site.

I have always likened it to owning a shop. For example, if you have a shop and it is situated in the middle of nowhere and no-one knows about it, no-one will find it, no matter how good it looks or how good your products are. If you have roads pointing to it and people are talking about it or recommending it, you will be found. This is how it is online too. The ‘roads’ are a form of link building, which was very effective several years ago and is still very useful for increasing site rankings, although it is tackled differently today.

• Social media sites, such as Google+, Facebook and Twitter are where people talk or chat.

There are actually new SEO algorithms that are being used by the top search engines today and are much more effective in figuring out which sites do deserve to get the highest ranks.

• Google has been using the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) algorithm for years.

• Instead of simply looking at the keywords entered in the search engine, the LSI algorithm also takes into consideration many other factors like the website’s overall structure, the theme and syntax used, as well as various synonyms of the keyword that are used throughout the content of the website.

Many updates to the search engines algorithms, especially the last few months, caused worldwide panic. Websites that used to have top rankings have fallen from grace and been overtaken by other sites that made use of natural search engine optimization techniques. In other words, it is no longer enough to fill your website with ‘keywords’ and hope that you will be found.

We can help you have your website seen, by using Google’s favourite platforms, Google+ and YouTube, for a very low cost. If you are interested, please contact us for a quote.