Not Ranking High Enough on Search Engines? Here?s Some Help!

SEO News Tip of the Day!

SEO can seem like a long hard slog with little to no reward at times. Your mind often racing, constantly thinking about keyword phrases, H1 tags and links as you lay in bed trying to catch a few winks. Six months down the line your SEO efforts are nowhere to be seen, not even a trace, except in the redness of what used to be the whites of your eyes. But what if, it didn’t have to be this way. What if, there was a method of seeing results sooner rather than later.

I still remember when I first set out on my path of SEO enlightenment, vividly. If I knew some of things I know now, it would have been a completely different journey and a much shorter one to arrive at the place I’m at now (slightly further up a never ending path). The sleepless nights as my brain churned through the new chunks of information learnt that day. The eureka moments when you learn the most simplistic of things like anchor text and emphasising keywords with bold tags. Learning how to perform keyword research was one of the most enjoyable and undervalued aspects of SEO. And did I mention the sleepless nights.

Anyway enough reminiscing and back to topic of this article. The SEO snowball effect is a simple an analogy. Remember those cartoons where a character would role down a snow covered hill, gathering more snow and increasing in size until they crashed into something like a tree. Well that is the SEO snowball effect, minus the crash at the end (hopefully).

You see, if you drew a chart that measured the effort put into SEO and the traffic it produces, you get something very much similar to that snowball. At first the effort you put in yields very little traffic if any at all. But putting the same amount of effort in again results in slightly more traffic, until further along the chart, the same amount of effort yields a much greater output of traffic.

The problem with this is the time it can take to see the first initial traffic from your efforts. Many webmasters will give up because of this, while others carry on but only see little reward in the first year or so. However, there is a way of optimising the initial stages of this snowball and it all comes down to keyword selection.

In brief, many webmasters focus on keywords they believe are worth the effort in terms of traffic and rightly so. After all what’s the point of chasing keywords that no one uses or only have a very small number of impressions? So we go after the big boys, the keywords with lots and lots of traffic. But this contributes to the snowball effect because the effort required to obtain a top hundred ranking can be a lot on keywords with higher traffic levels. While the traffic gained from being listed in position 67 will be insignificant. So may be there is a reason to gun for those keywords with fewer impressions?

If you conduct you keyword research intelligently you should be able to find quite a few keyword phrases with small amounts of traffic but more importantly, phrases that contain your main keywords. By optimising these phrases you are contributing to the SEO of your main keywords, simply because the main keyword is part of phrase. These lesser phrases in terms of traffic are much easier to reach traffic generating results and therefore can be done much quicker. Once you’re happy with the rankings of that phrase, simply move onto the next until all small traffic phrases are optimised. In a lot of cases the combined traffic from sub-primary keyword phrases can be more than the primary keyword it self, not to mention more targeted.

When all sub-primary phrases are optimised, the chances are your site will rank well for the primary keyword with little to work left at all to get the top spot. The best thing is you have targeted the best keywords but received highly targeted traffic earlier in the campaign. Turning the snowball effect from an annoying symptom into a competitive advantage.

Article by James Anderson, an SEO Consultant at Podium Solutions, a web design and internet marketing company based Manchester, UK.

©2005 James Anderson. Author bio box, links and copyright notice must be included in all reproductions of this article.

Search engines are frugal things. (Froogle, too, haha! Sorry, lame joke) They take many, many things into consideration when ranking your pages. Below are some things you should do to be sure you're ranked as high as possible.

Go for keyphrases, not single keywords. Unless you want to spend the next 3 months trying to break into the first page for a single keyword, focus on keyphrases. Besides, most searchers search for two or more words. Single keywords just don't provide the targeted results searchers are looking for.

Focus on the keyphrases that you can take over. Keyphrases like "Exit now" or "Exit Here" or even a keyword like "Exit" will be next to impossible for you to get a top 3 ranking, because of the overwhelming popularity for porn site landing pages to put a link to Yahoo, Google, or Disney with the anchor text of one of those keyphrases mentioned above. Go ahead, try it out ? type one of them into Google and see what you get. Funny enough, Disney recently took the lead over Yahoo for the keyword "Exit." Go Disney go!

Don't allow your site to focus on more than 1-2 different things. Create separate sites for each product or service, and if you'd like, a main site to describe your company, and have it link to all of your products. This will allow you to better target your pages, because a user looking for widgets isn't going to stick around long on a page for a company that sells widgets and woozles, when they don't see information about widgets (even if it's blatantly obvious) Think about it this way: You're always one click away from losing a customer on the internet. Do everything you can to eliminate that one click.

The more content you have, the better. Wait, let me rephrase that ? the more RELEVANT content you have, the better. Plain old content, or keyword-stuffed will only get you so far. Remember, you've got to keep your visitors in mind primarily, because it doesn't matter how high your SE ranking is if your visitors don't convert to customers.

Start posting articles on your site; you're the expert here, so utilize that information. But keep your articles from sounding like you're only writing it to advertise your product (advertorials). If it sounds too much like an ad, your visitors won't read it.

Also, try to mention your chosen keyphrases as much as you can without making the article sound "stuffed." What's "stuffed" mean? Here's an example: You're writing about widgets, you wrote the widgets article about widgets so you could say widgets as much as you possible while talking about widgets. Would you want to sit and read that? No. Neither would anyone else.

There are also quite a few places on the net where you can find articles that are free to reprint on your site. A few of them are http://www.EzineArticles.com, http://www.Content-Articles.com, and http://www.ArticlesFactory.com. As I said, there are many sites like these, but these are the 3 best, in my opinion. Some article directories are focused on a single set of topics (like Business Marketing) and others, including the three mentioned above, contain articles from many, many categories.

If you write your own articles, submitting them to as many article sites as possible, again including the three I listed before. The more places you submit your article, the more sites will pick it up ? either through RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or by cutting and pasting your article to their site. The latter option is preferable to you, because your article will stay on their site longer. This will work hard to generate you more traffic from visitors to those sites who read your article and increase your SE rankings through backlinks. (For more information, check out an article I wrote about backlinks at http://www.Content-Articles.com/article.aspx?i=24)

Add new content at least weekly, and absolutely no less than monthly to give your customers reason to come back, and Search Engines will also increase your ranking because your site is active and you've got good content.

Forums can be great tools for site promotion, if you do it right. Do NOT post ads to a forum that isn't for posting ads. You will do more to destroy your credibility than generate traffic. Put a link to your site in your signature, and post questions and answers to the site, just like everyone else. If a topic that your site contains information about comes up, feel free to post the URL in the body of the topic (make sure this is allowed by the forum rules first) but always mention that it's your site, so nobody is mislead and thinks the post is a referral, which it's not (because it's your site).

These tips are just a few of the things that you can do to increase your search engine rankings. Take your time and develop a good site, write quality articles, submit them to as many places as possible, and watch your ranking go up while the visitors come rolling in.

Jason a long time web developer and the owner of Premier MicroSolutions, LLC. If you're looking for more articles about getting higher SE rankings, go to Content-Articles.com and check out their great directory of articles.