Ranking in Google is an Earned Privilege, Not a Right

Rant — By BS Free Marketing on June 14, 2010 10:33 pm

Google Rankings are Earned, Not Entitled

“If you build it, they will come!”, may be a maxim many follow when creating a website, but the reality comes as a cold, freezing slap across the face for most. Generating traffic to your site is crucial if it is to provide any meaningful impact on your business in terms of profit, sales and generating brand awareness, but this takes more than a great looking website – it takes a lot of planned and recurring effort to promote your website to both the search engines, such as Google, and to human visitors who have money to burn.

Think for a moment about what a website is. A good analogy is to look at a website as being a billboard on the side of a road – the more cars driving along that road, then the greater the response and impact from the billboard. How good the billboard is helps a lot to convert drivers, but to have any impact at all, you need the billboard labeled somewhere where people will see it to begin with.

Imagine your website is a billboard which is in the middle of a desert and only rarely does a car pass by. Fortunately, the satellite navigation systems of all these drivers can detour them past your billboard, provided you offer something of value. These satellite navigation systems are the search engines and of them all, Google is the largest and most important. If you convince Google to send you traffic, you stand a much better chance of achieving your online business objectives.

Therein is the crucial key – you must convince Google and the other search engines to send you traffic.

This means there is a lot of work to do in promoting your website which goes beyond simply providing a lot of content. For a start, the content you do use must be relevant and optimized for the search terms which are likely to generate the traffic to begin with. This requires website owners to research key phrases extensively so they have a good grasp on what their potential customers are using to find information in the net in connection with their service and product offering. The content and website coding, then needs to be optimized with this keyword research in mind.

It is almost impossible to get a high ranking in Google without obtaining an extensive network of other websites linking to yours. A link from another website is considered to be a vote of confidence in your own site, and this in turn is rewarded with a higher ranking. To be of value, a link must come from a site which is relevant – there is little value in a link from a website selling flowers when you are selling hi-tech electronics. Link building is a definite art which requires a lot of tact, diplomacy and negotiation between website owners in order to optimize the impact on search engine rankings. It is time consuming and a good link portfolio is not built in a few days or weeks.

Search engines are not the only game in town either – a considerable amount of user time is being spent on social media sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and MySpace. Building a great site is only one aspect of your online business presence; perhaps it is better to regard the website as the commercial focus around which you will build a network of online sites which point back to the main website. Blogging, Facebook fan pages, article marketing, Twitter tweeting and a whole lot more should be considered to spread the word about your fantastic website loaded with lots of relevant content, but all of this is going to take time.

Gaining a high Google rank is something which takes patience and a lot of hard work and even more to maintain that high ranking once it is achieved. This means that successful website management must adopt a reiterative approach to promotion and constantly work at improving the site and site marketing to open the search engine flood gates which will direct potential customers to your online billboard.

Shell Harris, Big Oak SEO