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How To Turn The Search Engines Into Find Engines

Designing and building a website can be a thankless task. You spend hours of your time planning, designing and creating the whole site, carefully assembling it into a work of digital art. Having lovingly pored over every word and put heart and soul into a decent navigation system and a well thought out layout, you eagerly publish your site and hold your breath for the torrent of visitors. It is somewhat disappointing, therefore, to find that days can go by without a single hit. You know that it can take a while for the search engines to identify and crawl your site, but as the days crawl by it can become very disheartening.

After some time you will, almost certainly, start to welcome a few visitors to your site, and maybe a few of them will spend their hard earned money there as well. But you’ll probably find that you get terribly excited if you have a few visitors, and a little dejected when you start to work out how much the current rate of visitors will earn you, and dreams of the Mediterranean cruise next month might have to be put on hold. If this sounds familiar, ask yourself what you have actually done to ensure that your site does become a success? Other than a slick design, nice graphics and a catchy address, what practical measures have you employed to ensure success?

Perhaps you have come across websites that talk about how to make sure your website is optimized so that it is more easily found. This mainly reflects on the way in which search engines find you and list your site in their search results. Bearing in mind how many millions of searches are carried out every day on the internet, making sure that the major search engines know your site exists, and list it, will be of huge benefit. However, being listed is one thing, being high up on those lists is quite another.

When someone carries out a keyword search for, say ‘empty egg timer’ and you just happen to sell these handy devices (useful for those who don’t have to worry about how long anything takes) then you will need your website to be right at the top of the list, so that people will find you easily, and come looking to buy from you. On Google alone, a keyword search for ‘empty egg timer’ generates nearly half a million websites! That means that there are approximately 50,000 pages of results. Incredibly, only 3% of people ever look beyond the first page of results, which means that 499,990 websites will be missed, and only 10 sites seen by 97% of visitors! You can see just how important it is to make sure you’re on that first page, and preferably at the very top of the list. If your website is on page 2, it might as well be on page 49,999, since almost no one will ever find it.

So what is it that helps you get to the top of your keyword search rank? Is there a single big secret that many SEO companies are aware of, and will only tell you for a huge fee? Certainly many companies do seem to suggest that they alone have the answer, and that only by going through them will the Golden Secret be revealed to you, and suddenly your site will rocket to the top. In fact, there are three things wrong with this. Firstly, there is no single solution - it’s a combination of many varied factors. Secondly, no one single company can ever offer guarantees, promises or assurances that your site will be at the top, or near the top - they can try, and almost certainly your site will rise, but this depends on other factors beyond anyone’s control. This might, for example, be because your website is in a mass market, such as insurance. With hundreds of thousands of keyword competitors, getting near the top is a huge endeavour, whereas if you’re selling rainbow coloured light bulbs then there is likely to be much less competition, and so more chance you’ll rise more quickly, and further. The third thing is that any rise is never going to be overnight, and any progress can take weeks, if not months or even years.

Some of the factors which will influence how well your site is ranked include keywords. Search engines scan the documents that make up your website, and catalogue the keywords which occur within it. This helps them to judge the relevance of your site compared to others and to keyword searches. It used to be relatively easy to reach the top of the search results simply by inserting hundreds of keywords all over your site. This now no longer has the effect it did, and there are many other factors which have much more influence. How many people link to your site is a big factor - obviously the more people linking to you, the more popular your site, and the more credibility is gains in the eyes of the search engines, and so your site will rise up the ranks.

I have actually come across a website which is able to analyze your website against these, and the myriad of other factors which affect the ranking of your site. I was surprised to come across it because it actually offers its service free of charge. All you do is enter your web address and contact details, and they carry out a whole range of tests to assess how well your site does for certain keyword searches, and what you could do yourself to improve it. Of course, they offer their services as far as making these improvements is concerned, but this is optional, and if you’re happy doing the work yourself, it’s a really handy service that will save you a lot of time, and a very great deal of money.

It can often be quite obscure little changes that you wouldn’t think of - such as the position of the text on the page, the number of menu links and outside links you have, the length of your sentences and so on. Knowing what you can do to help get your website noticed is a massive step toward getting up towards that golden first page. I have a number of websites, and I can’t say I have always tried every single bit of advice, but even by applying a few which suit me, I have noticed that my sites are climbing higher. Don’t forget, no one ever gets overnight top rank placement, and your eventual position will depend largely on the number of keyword competitors you have, but I’d certainly recommend getting your site checked out, after all, it’s free!

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