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My Website is Ranked High – Where’s the Traffic?

By Steve Shaw in Featured

Since you started your website, you’ve probably noticed that there is a continual quest to get a high ranking in Google and the other search engines.

The reason why a high ranking is so sought after is the resultant traffic that accompanies being listed at the top of Google’s results lists. Google is the biggest referral source on the planet. It can send you more referrals than any human being can. It’s open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and whenever a person has a question, his first step will usually be to “Google” it to find the answer.

If you can get your website to be #1 in the rankings when people search for topics related to your niche, then your website can get around 8.5 times more search engine referrals than the website in the #5 spot.

That’s a substantial difference – you can see why website owners are panting after the #1 spot!

A website owner presented an interesting question to me the other day. He had been doing article submissions consistently for a while. His website was ranked very high for his keyword terms, but yet he still wasn’t receiving the massive amount of traffic that he was expecting. He wondered what was wrong. Why did the high ranking not result in a ton of traffic?

Let’s think about this for a minute. Each phrase that a person types into Google (or any other search engine) is called a “search term.” From the website owner’s perspective, it’s called a “keyword term.”

If you have a lot of people searching for a particular term, then the keyword is in high demand. If you can rank highly for that term, then you can see a huge traffic increase. That is a keyword phrase with a big potential payoff.

If, on the other hand, there are not that many people searching for that phrase, then even if you rank high for that term, you won’t see a dramatic impact on your website’s traffic. You can be ranked high, even #1, for a keyword phrase, but it won’t necessarily translate into a traffic breakthrough because the demand for that phrase is not very high.

What does this mean for you as you’re starting to use article marketing to market your website?

You need to do keyword research. Look at the demand that a particular phrase has (how many people are searching for that term each month) and compare it to the supply – the supply is the number of websites that are competing for that term.

Ideally, you would be looking for a keyword term that has high demand and relatively low supply – that would mean that with a little effort, you could rise to the top of the rankings for that term, and you would see a dramatic change in the number of website visitors you receive.

If you’re in a competitive niche that already has lots of competition, this might not be an option for you. You might have to work harder to get to the top of the rankings for your keyword terms. That’s okay, as long as the demand for the term is still high. When you rise up in the rankings, you will see your traffic grow too.

You could also choose to target a keyphrase that had a lower demand (fewer people searching for it), but also low competition. You could have a relatively easy time getting to the top of the rankings for that term. One thing to keep in mind though is that the benefit will be in proportion to the popularity of the term. If there are not that many people searching for the term, then being ranked #1 can only get you as much traffic as there are searchers for that term.

I hope this explains why you can have a high search engine ranking and not see a big boost in traffic. The traffic you receive is dependent on how “in demand” that term is – how many people are searching for it. Do your keyword research on the front end of your article marketing campaign, and you can decide which keywords are worth your effort to pursue.

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Steve Shaw has helped thousands of business owners worldwide build traffic, leads and sales to their websites, and he wants to help you do the same – grab his free report giving you a blueprint for attracting sustainable, dirt-cheap, long-term, targeted traffic to any website…
including yours! Go now to http://www.submityourarticle.com/ report – some people have used the same information to boost their traffic by up to 600%!

10 Reasons Your Site’s Search Engine Ranking Dropped

By Paul M Ventura in Featured

Search engine traffic is one of the most valuable and targeted sources of traffic because people generally trust web pages which garner one of the top spots in their search engine of choice. It takes a lot of time in link building and building your social search reputation on social networks.

If your search engine traffic disappears overnight, then without being properly diversified in the kinds of traffic you tap, you can find yourself up the creek with no paddle. This is why I preach the importance of traffic diversity.

But why did your ranking suddenly drop? This post will look at 10 of the most common reasons for why your ranking can disappear seemingly out of nowhere.

The Google Honeymoon Ended

If you have a relatively new site which is only a few months old and you found that you were enjoying cushy rankings for much of that time until now, it’s most likely the result of the Google Honeymoon. This is the term for the phenomenon where a new site enjoys high rankings for a short period of time before falling to its more realistic ranking.

Google Sandbox Effect Started

The Criteria For Improving Your Website Ranking

By Martin Sejas in Featured

Any website owner wants their website to be ranking well for those keywords which will mean that targeted visitors arrive on their website and possibly turn into customers or clients.

A website’s ranking on search engines (especially Google) is quite important when you take into account the following important statistics:

- 90% of users don’t go past the Page 1 of Google
- 42% of users click on the website on position 1, 12.5% on position 2 and only 8% on position 3

What does this all mean?

This means that if your website is not on Page 1 of Google and in the top 3 positions, then you are effectively missing out on more than 60% of potential visitors (and customers for that matter).

If your website isn’t currently in a good position on the search engines, don’t panic! There are many things you can do to move its rankings up. Below is a list of website ranking factors from the most important:

URL

If you want to rank for a certain keyword, it’s absolutely vital that you have that keyword in your domain name. If you feel tempted to use your company or brand name instead, keep in mind that the goal of ranking at number 1 for your main keyword will only get much harder if you do so.

Domain Age

If you register a brand new domain name, you are going to be starting from scratch. However, a start is a start and as the months and years go by, your website will benefit immensely from this factor. On the other hand, you can get a head start by purchasing an expired domain name which does not currently have an owner. Just make sure that it hasn’t been banned by the search engines before purchasing.

Title Tag

Having the keyword in the title tag of your home page is a MUST. There are many websites which still use their brand name or company name in their title tag which make ranking for target keywords even harder. This is a ranking factor that is applicable to all pages on your website.

Page Structure

Optimize each page on your website for just 1 keyword. Every page on your website should only be optimized for one keyword. Any more and ranking for your target keywords will be that much difficult. Your home page should target the main keyword while other pages should target related, long tailed keywords.

Keyword Density

It’s important that you mention the keyword you are targeting on the relevant page. A good density to aim for is 3% which means that your target keyword only makes up 3% of the text on the page. Any more and your page could be seen as being spammy.

Backlinks

You’re probably wondering why backlinks is at the bottom of the list when it is an important factor in getting website rankings. The reason why I put it down there is to emphasize getting your website set up right first before getting backlinks. Getting hundreds or even thousands of backlinks to a website which is incorrectly optimized will diminish the value of each link in getting rankings.

On the subject of backlinks, it’s important that you get them from a variety of sources while using a variety of anchor text.

The key to a successful website in terms of getting targeted traffic and customers is all in this article. Read it many times over if you have to. Simply get these website ranking factors right and you will have a immensely successful website before you know it.

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Martin Sejas provides an Internet marketing consulting service for people who want to establish an online presence for their business or dramatically improve their current online presence today. You can register for a free consultation today. www.internetmarketingadvice.com.au

What To Do When Your Website Does Not Rank Well In Google

By Bill Platt in Featured

Online marketers frequently struggle with the question of how to compete when Google fails to look positively upon a particular website. In this article, I will focus on how to build rankings and drive traffic to your website, using Google and the other search engines.

What Motivates Google’s Algorithm

Over the years, many have tried to claim, even in court, that Google was unfairly keeping their website out of the top of Google’s search results. But, the truth is that Google is not beholden to the needs and desires of the webmasters who want to be on page one of Google’s natural search results.

Instead, Google is beholden to its stockholders and its need to earn profits. Google has determined that the best way to keep profits high is to keep Internet users flocking to its websites. Google accomplishes that by giving its users the kind of information they are looking to find, and Google weights its search algorithm towards what Google believes its search audience wants to see in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

It is important for online marketers to understand that it is not always in Google’s best interest for our websites to rank well in Google.

How Important Is Google In Search?

Worldwide, Google is currently providing 78% of all searches (http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=4).

But in 2007, Google only provided 52% of my website’s total search traffic. Yahoo, Windows Live, Ask, and MSN provided the next 42%. The remaining 6% of my website’s search traffic came from another 55 smaller search engines.

On my website, only 48.8% of my 2007 traffic actually came from search engines. The remaining 51.2% of my website’s quarter million visitors came directly from article placements on other websites, recommendations from other people, forum posts, and from people who have bookmarks for my website.

Tips For Ranking Well For Specific Keywords

It has been my experience that it is easier to rank in 1) MSN / Windows Live, 2) Yahoo, and then 3) Google, in that order. Quite frankly, I have always ignored the role of Ask in the search market. While MSN is the easiest search engine to rank in, it only delivered 4.6% of my total search traffic in 2007.

I read a question in a forum, where the poster was asking how he could get his website to rank well in Google for the search term, “software”.

The truth is that it is nearly impossible in nearly every search engine to rank well in the natural results for such a singular keyword, such as “software”. In a nutshell, if you want to rank well in Google, you need to build inbound links (IBLs) to your website with your targeted keywords in the links.

But, you don’t want to put all of your links together with one keyword phrase. One of Google’s red flags is when they notice a link to a particular website appearing more than 60% of the time with one specific keyword phrase.

Utilizing a variety of long-tail keywords will actually serve you better in the search-engine ranking puzzle, in more ways than one. After all, when I do a search for software, I don’t type in the search word, “software”. I type in search phrases like: “accounting software”, “small business accounting software”, “windows software accounting small business”, “windows image editing software”, “windows software image editor”, “windows xp photo album manager”, etc.

People searching the keyword “software” have yet to figure out that they are looking for specific kinds of software. Once they do an initial search, they are going to type in more specific search terms to find what they actually want. So, once you start targeting a variety of long-tail keyword phrases, then you will start seeing more success in your search marketing efforts.

How To Start Your Search Engine Optimization Journey

If you are wanting to get into the natural search results of Google and the other search engines, you must know before you dive into the project that getting good rankings in the search engines for your chosen keywords can take a really long time, before you begin seeing results.

While inbound links to your website, targeted to your chosen keywords, will help your website climb in the search results of your favorite search engines, it may be a frustrating journey.

Your competitors want to rank well for the same search terms you do. And since only ten of you can be on page one of the search results, you may have to work really hard to topple those guys already on page one of the results, and you will have to fight to keep your ranking once you get it.

There are some keyword phrases that are nearly impossible to rank for, even if you have really deep pockets. For example, most every keyword phrase for the financial industry will be extremely difficult to rank for in Google. Competition in this industry is fierce, so achieving top search rankings will be tough to say the least.

This is the reason why so many SEO experts encourage marketers to target “low-hanging fruit”. It may be fairly easy to rank well for a four- or five-word search phrase, and extremely expensive to target a two- or three-word search phrase.

My personal approach has always been to rotate through a list of more than 100 target keyword phrases, over a longer period of time. In doing so, I capture a lot of low-hanging fruit quickly, and at the end of the loop, I am a bit closer to snagging the fruit in the upper branches of the tree. At the end of my list, I analyze my keywords again to see where I am strong and to see where I am still weak, and then I begin the process again. (According to SEOdigger.com, I have better than 950 keyword phrases in the top twenty results of Google.)

How To Get Links

The challenge most people face when they begin building links to a website is where to get those essential links.

Article marketing is my chosen method for getting inbound links.

Because of Google’s news feed strategy, the initial placement of your article might appear immediately in the SERPs, but then it will disappear. During the news cycle phase of the Google algorithm, new materials are given an added boost in ranking. Once the news cycle is done, any new pages will sink back down to where they would be based on the general Google algorithm.

If you are honest with yourself, you know that every page on the Internet started life with a PageRank Zero, but given enough time, many pages will gain in PageRank, as they begin to be linked. For a more detailed look at the process of how reprint articles gain value for a website in Google’s search index, see my article about “Fishing for Links in Google“.

Utilizing article marketing as a link building method, I have put one website on the map in as little as eight weeks, with only three articles. This website has one #1, one #2, eight results on page one, and twelve results in the top twenty listings of Google. Most of those keywords also rank well in Yahoo and MSN.

On the other hand, on my main website, I started looking at the keyword phrase “article marketing” just eighteen months ago, when my website sat at #79. Today, my website sits at #12 in Google for that keyword phrase.

I believe that given enough time, investment and commitment, I can use article marketing to elevate any web page on the Internet to multiple page-one listings in Google. But, not everyone is willing to make the kind of investment and commitment one needs to get to the top of Google’s search results…

What To Do When You Need Results Now

If you simply cannot wait as long as it takes to build top rankings naturally, then you need to look seriously at Pay-Per-Click advertising models, such those offered through Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing.

About The Author:

Bill Platt offers Article Distribution and Article Ghost Writing services through his website at: http://www.thephantomwriters.com He has written an ebook that has been designed to help people create more effective articles. One customer said of his ebook, “I’ve read almost every ebook out there on article writing and article marketing and this one tops it all.” To learn more about Bill’s ebook or to get your own copy, please click this link.

© Copyright 2012 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

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