UK Companies – How To Turn The Search Engines Into Find Engines
Filed under Search Engine Optimization
Designing and building a UK 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 a while, of course, people do start to stumble across your site, and maybe you get one or two orders. This could encourage you, and you start to wonder how many you might come to expect over the next few days or weeks. With regret you start to accept that making your first million by Christmas seems somewhat unlikely. You may start to wonder why, since at least some people have started to find you, you don’t have more people coming. But thinking about it seriously, what have you actually done yourself to ensure that your site attracts visitors? It’s all very well having a site that is so good that people want to stay and buy, but they need to know it exists first.
One thing that you may have done is to browse through the internet and find information on how to promote your site, or tips on ‘UK search engine optimizing’ it. You are almost certainly aware of the fact that to be successful on the internet you really need the search engines on your side. Having your site listed by Google, MSN and Yahoo for example is going to make a big difference to your site. But, what will make a far bigger difference is the overall rank of your website.
The rank of your site refers to how far up the list of results your website is when someone searches the internet. If your website sells left handed calculators for example, then you will expect and hope that if someone enters the keywords ‘left handed calculator’ in a search engine that your website is near the top. If it is at the top, that is fantastic, but you really need to be in the top ten, on that first page, to be a success. Unbelievably, only 3% of people who search online ever look past the first page of results that a search engine brings up. That means that if they search for ‘left handed calculators’, which brings up almost 400,000 results in Google, you need your website to be high up the first page to stand any chance of someone finding it. Even being in 11th place out of those 400,000 will mean that you’re missing out on 97% of visitors.
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.
So what are these factors which affect the rank of your website? There are many different ways to win over the approval of a major search engine. The big factor used to be keywords, with search engines scanning through the pages on your site and identifying the relevant keywords. Unfortunately, many people took advantage of this and simply inserted great blocks of keywords, whether they were relevant or not, just to grab the attention of the search engines. This technique is more likely to lower your rank these days. One of the biggest factors is how many websites link to yours. Obviously if several hundred sites all have a link encouraging people to visit yours, that tells the search engines that your site must be pretty good, and so increase your rank.
There are many free things available on the internet, and many good services that cost money. I rarely come across a good service that I’d recommend, which also happens to be free, but if you’re a website owner like me, and are interested in knowing how your site’s doing as far as the search engines are concerned,it’s great to find a free service that offers interesting and valyable information on how you’re website is ranked in the major search engines. As the work is done manually, the results are very thorough. Of course, they’ll offer to do the work for you, but if you’ve already built your site, the chances are that you’ll be quite happy making the changes they recommend.With so many companies out there, to get one who actually put their money ‘where their mouth is’ is a bonus.Actually and to be fair, they were really down to earth to deal with and explained it all in simple english.
Knowing what your site does well, and what it doesn’t, will help you go a long way towards getting your website listed higher. I have a site which was hardly visible at all in Google’s results – even I got bored trying to find it. After spending a couple of days implementing a few very simple changes that made very little difference to the way the site appeared, I resubmitted it to Google. I checked it earlier today, and it’s now been ranked 15 palces higher! It’s a niche market, but even so, it’s now the first site people reach, and more and more people are finding it and spending money, which is great! For two days’ work, it was well worth it. I’d certainly recommend you get your site checked out; from my experience it really made a big difference.
