Ranking #1 in the Search Engines

If you want to find information about a product or service, what’s the first thing you do? If you’re like the majority of earthlings you go online and use a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo. From there, you scan the results page and start clicking on some of the links, usually starting with one of the results in the top three positions (depending on which result sounds most promising for what you’re looking for).



Knowing this, it makes sense that if you have a business, you’ll want the people who are searching for what you’re selling to find your website, which means you need to get your website to the top of the search engines results pages (SERPs) for your keywords, so that people searching for your product or service will find you before they find your competitors!



Sponsored Versus Free Search Engine Listings



Many businesses will choose to advertise their websites using paid results (in Google you see these ads at the top with a slightly colored background and down the right side of the page) in the hope that people will see their ad when they search and will click on it instead of choosing one of the other listings. This can work if you know what you are doing, but it can cost a lot of money and some studies show that people are around 80% less likely to click on a sponsored ad. While it’s helpful when your business and website are new to advertise this way, ultimately you want to be at the top of the free (or organic) listings.



The first thing you need to do is understand a little about how the search engines work. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo are using increasingly complex algorithms for determining which pages rank highest (in the Wild West days of internet marketing it was easy to "trick" the search engines into ranking your page highly even if you provided useless information, now it’s much more difficult). In general, to get your site to rank highly it is best to do it naturally, by providing web content with good valuable information, while tweaking the code a bit to help the search engines know exactly what your website is about.



What the Engines Are Looking For



The main thing the search engines look for when ranking pages is which sites are most relevant to the search terms being used. Try to imagine a checklist of about 200 things that Google is taking into consideration when they "audition" your site for the role of #1. Though no one knows all of the ingredients of each of the search engine’s ‘secret sauce’ we know that they place great importance on being able to find the search term somewhere on the page (some believe about 3% of the overall word count). They are also very interested in how long your site has been around, if it is easy to crawl or read through the pages, and if it downloads quickly.



Another thing that the search engines look for is how many other websites link to the site in question. Google especially considers this to be a vote of confidence for a site. One that has lots of inbound links from good websites will tend to rank more highly than one that doesn’t. However, again it’s not just about getting thousands of random links from here, there, and everywhere. It’s about getting a number of good quality links from websites whose content relates in some way to your own.



Getting the right balance of keywords and phrases on your page and in your html code and garnering quality links is known as Search Engine Optimization (Hudson Valley SEO). This requires a little bit of know-how and hard work if you want to do it yourself or you can hire a company that specializes in SEO Hudson Valley to optimize your website so that it will rank highly for your keywords in the SERPs.But unless your customers are people who have not heard of "this new fangled inner webs the kids are talking about" then you probably want to act now to help your site get traffic from search.