To Understand Your Rankings in the Search Engines You Need to Understand How They Work.

Relevance is the key to success when it comes to search engine rankings.

Many people still are under the impression that a website is a unit, like a brochure. People would land on your home page and then browse your website, like paging through a brochure.

In many instances you will find that information on one page is left out referring the visitor to a separate page expecting that they have already seen and read this page.

This is a myth; your website consists of separate pages, each being a stand alone page and must be able to do the job by itself.

Visitors do not necessarily land on your home page and then browse your site…

...they can land on any of the pages directly from the search engine results.

Relevance is the reason.

The main purpose of a search engine like Google, Yahoo, MSN and so on is to give the person using the search engine the most relevant results based on the words that they typed into the search bar.

At this time Google does the job the best and that is why Google is also the search engine preferred by most people.

Here are the basics of how it works.

You type “blue basset dog” into the search bar of the search engine and hit search. Based on the words the search engine accesses it’s database and returns results that according to it’s algorithm is the most relevant to your search. The results are displayed ten on a page, page one, page two and so on. With the search engines having refined their algorithms and constantly making them better 90% of people doing a search find what they are looking for on page one, the first ten results. In essence this means that if you are selling blue basset dogs and your website does not appear on page one results you are losing 90% of potential clients. This is proof of the value of page one results for generating new sales or business leads.

So how did the site that appeared in position one get there?

It gave the search engine what it wanted.

The entire process is a lot more technical than this but the basics are that for a page to rank in the top ten results for a search term in the search engines it needs to comply with search engine criteria.

Relevance is the most important.

The page has to be about “blue basset dogs”. The information contained on the page needs to be about “blue basset dogs”. The tags (html tags) need to tell the search engine robots that the page is about “blue basset dogs”

The content on the page needs to be unique, this means that the content is at least 30% different to all other similar content on the internet.

You can’t just copy and paste a page content, only one will rank and the other will be discarded.

Links pointing to your site

Without links pointing to your site letting the search engines know what your page is about it has little chance of ranking.

These links originate from other websites across the internet and it works almost like votes. The more votes you have suggests that you are the most important page for the term.

Again this is explained very broadly and there are more technical factors playing a role but the basics will always remain the same.

The bottom line is that if you are not actively using your website to promote your business to potential new clients you are going to lose business.

As time changes so do methods by which potential clients are finding you.

We offer you this service from start to finish.

It is important to remember that natural ranking results are not achieved overnight, it takes time and the time is determined largely by the competing sites for the same keyword.

To get to position one you have to be better in all aspects than the page that is currently on page one.