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There is no magic bullet for rankings

Posted on 03. Jul, 2009 by admin in E-Marketing

Here at Small Busi­ness Inter­net Mar­ket­ing we are often asked by our small busi­ness clients “What is the one thing we can do to get a good rank­ing in Google?” It is like many peo­ple see that their site is lack­ing the one spe­cial ingre­di­ent that, when cor­rected or incor­po­rated, will pump up their rank­ing. The num­ber of snake oil inter­net sales pitches float­ing around seems to encour­age this per­cep­tion. You know “Rank num­ber 1 in Google in 24 hours” type of push.

We feel a bit like the Christ­mas Grinch when we have to say “There is no magic bullet.”

As we have dis­cussed a num­ber of times on our posts, on-page SEO and off-page SEO is what gets your site rank­ing in Google. These are not overnight results. On-page opti­mi­sa­tion by and large is within the con­trol of a small busi­ness (with the right advice and under­stand­ing) whereas off-page opti­mi­sa­tion is a far longer slog but cer­tainly builds a fortress around your rank­ing when done properly.

We often talk about align­ment and con­sis­tency being the keys to on-page opti­mi­sa­tion. What we mean by this is:

Align­ment refers to the key­word research you need to do in your busi­ness seg­ment to deter­mine what key­words have the appro­pri­ate search query vol­umes in the right geo­graphic loca­tions. Align­ment also takes in other mat­ters like the online com­mer­cial inten­tion (are the key­words “buy” focussed), appro­pri­ate­ness to your busi­ness (as we said in the last post, an aquar­ium shop opti­mised for “busi­ness suits” is not a win­ner) and are the key­words really what they say (for exam­ple does “online edit­ing” refer to text edit­ing searches, video edit­ing searches, audio edit­ing searches, etc).

Con­sis­tency then refers to how you use the cho­sen key­words on your site. It is things like mak­ing sure key­words appear in the URL, in the page title, in the page descrip­tion, in the copy on the page at the right den­sity, etc. But it goes fur­ther. Many sites have way too many prod­uct offered on the one page — it con­fuses the life out of search engines because they just see a web­page with a whole pile of dif­fer­ent prod­ucts. Where pos­si­ble, make each prod­uct (or group of sim­i­lar prod­uct) its own web­page and opti­mise the key­words for this page dif­fer­ently to other pages.

This may all seems fairly unex­cit­ing and ordi­nary, but we can tell you that vir­tu­ally every web­site or blog we are asked to review or improve makes these same fun­da­men­tal mis­takes. Once you get these in place, then go hunt­ing for suit­able back links to your site for off-page opti­mi­sa­tion. Have a read of our post on how Small Busi­ness Inter­net Mar­ket­ing got to a Google num­ber 2 rank­ing through on-page opti­mi­sa­tion alone.

Think of the process like build­ing a brick wall. Once you have the foun­da­tion, you build the bot­tom course brick by brick, you then build a sec­ond course brick by brick — even­tu­ally you have a six foot high solid fence, all made out of indi­vid­ual bricks. The foun­da­tion is hav­ing a domain and host­ing pack­age, each well researched key­word is a brick, each URL with the key­word in it is another brick, and so on and so on. Get it right and even­tu­ally Google can­not ignore your site.

So, always remem­ber that the rank­ing of every small busi­ness web­site or blog lives or dies by get­ting the align­ment and con­sis­tency right first.

Related Posts:

• A New Wave in the Busi­ness World
• PPC Search Engine Inter­net Marketing
• Inter­net Mar­ket­ing Services
• Inter­net Mar­ket­ing Suc­cess – 3 Tips for Online Martket­ing Success
• The Short­cut into Online Mar­ket­ing Issues

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