One of the well known facts of marketing is that higher visibility always results in better business. This is the reason why most organizations are concerned about the location of their offices and workshops. The same is true for the virtual world and companies that have websites listed on the first page of a search engine will definitely get more hits and subsequently more business as compared to websites that are languishing on the 20th page. This rank on a search engine is not something you can purchase and it is almost completely dependent on Search Engine Optimization commonly known as SEO.
The following are the main criteria that a search engine considers when it decides the rank of a particular website from among the thousands and millions that are pulled up with a particular keyword:
- The most important thing is the quality of content as this is something that the spiders of the search engine recognize instantly and easily. A website with relevant and unique content will almost always be placed above a website that has concentrated more on the outlay of the site and less on the original content. If your website is newer it will be difficult to rank above older more reputable sites without new, relevant content.
- Age of the website is also another key factor as the spiders crawl through older websites more often than they do through the newer ones. Hence, older websites automatically get a higher rank. This can be explained by an analogy from the real world. When you are engaged in business and have to give credit, you are much more comfortable giving credit to someone who has been working with you for years as against someone who has just started to work for you. The same is true for search engines and hence they place priority on an older website over the comparatively newer ones.
- Other factors that impact the page rank are the frequency of updating the site, value of incoming links and the internal linking structure. Most search engines use a mathematical formula to display more relevant sites over the less relevant options.
The biggest issue is that most search engines take between one to three months to update the results and hence a change that you make today will not immediately impact the rank of your website. SEO is basically a continuous process that involves tweaking various factors and continuously adding quality content. You have to invest a lot of time, effort and money to get the desired results. Moreover, the type of keywords being targeted also makes a huge difference as a common and much used word like “diet” would require longer and more intensive optimization as there are thousands of entries that will be pulled up with this word. The bottom line is that SEO is not a 100 meter dash but a long and continuous marathon and the only winners are those who keep at it for prolonged periods of time and do not give up hope and stop.
