The Budget Webmaster’s 6 Step Guide to Improving Existing Rankings in Google

You know the scenario. You get an occasional click from Google for a certain keyword. You go to find out why you aren’t getting more clicks, and you find out that you’re ranked in the 30′s, 50′s, or heaven forbid, the 300′s. “Great”, you think, “I finally get ranked for a good keyword and it’s a worthless ranking”.

Not necessarily.

If you got ranked for a keyword you wanted At All, the game’s not over yet. If your site’s content is geared towards that subject, you can get your ranking in search engines increased, at no cost. How?

The first thing you want to do is find out how well you are ranked for this keyword. For Google in particular, this used to be a difficult chore. In the old days of 2003, you’d spend your valuable time doing a search on your desired keyword, then a sub-search for your site, and crawling through pages of listings to find out exactly where you stood.

Now there is hope in the form of the following website. Direct your browser to:

http://www.googlerankings.com/index.php

You can use this site to find out what number you come up for in the Google listings, which can be very powerful information if used correctly. If you’re ranked in the top 1000, you have a shot at raising your listing for that page by tweaking the page to be a little more relevant.

So, secondly, you have to know how good a shot you have at getting a better listing. Go to:

http://www.searchguild.com/difficulty/

I posted a tip about this a month ago, and it’s also in the free optimization Guide I released the week of March 7th. It tells you how hard it is to rank well for certain keywords in Google. You’ll need a free Google API key to use it.

Now that you know your chances, the third piece of information you need to know is how much traffic you can expect. Digital Point has a free tool that gives an approximation of how many hits per day a good ranking gets. Access it here:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

Okay, let’s say everything checks out so far. You rank in the top 1000. The term you want won’t be that hard to get, and will get you enough traffic per month to justify your efforts.

Our fifth step is to take the term you chose and optimize your page.

This site does periodic reports on the search engines, and their February report gives their analysis of what the best ranking pages in Google have in common. And as a free bonus, it will also tell you what Yahoo wants. Follow the following link for details-http://www.gorank.com

Now that you know what to shoot for, you need to know how the page you want will measure up- you need to calculate your keyword density. You can also do the sixth step at gorank.com – it has a free tool that will calculate it for you. Prepare your page with that in mind, re-upload, and you’re almost done.

Great, you’re all set. Now you should submit your site to Google, right?

Wrong. Absolutely not. If you can help it, you should never, ever submit any page of your site to Google. Let it find you. HOW it finds you can affect your page rank. I don’t mean that there is a standard penalty for submitting. There’s been speculation on that for a while but I have yet to prove it matters.

What I DO know from personal experience and testing on my member’s sites, is that getting the Googlebot search engine spider to happen upon your site shaves up to 6 weeks off the standard time it takes for indexing. You can show up in Google in as little as 4 days.

Which site links to you can also affect your Google Page Rank. While this is not as important as it once was, it still carries significant weight– my site didn’t start getting spidered on a daily basis until my Page Rank increased to 5.

So even if the spider comes to your site on a Monthly basis, you’re better off waiting for the spider to come back by. That’s the seventh step, let your page be re-discovered with it’s great new changes.

And yes, there’s an even faster, better way to get Google.com’s search engine spider to re-index that page, but that’s another article, isn’t it?

The “Number One” Question – the question that I (and probably every other Internet marketing expert on the planet) am most frequently asked:

“How do I get to be Number One in the search engines for widgets? After all, my company is the world’s leading provider of widgets – it’s ridiculous that these other nobody companies are coming up in search engines ahead of us . . . “

My response is almost always along the lines of:

“Forget that right now, and get a life!”

OK, so I am a little more tactful than that – and I do occasionally encourage an in-depth search engine optimization strategy, but usually I’ll encourage clients to spend their website promotional budget in other ways.

Here are the main reasons why I’m not generally enthusiastic about free search engines:

1. You have to be really careful in choosing keywords

Many people make the mistake of focusing on very generic keywords. Not only are these even more difficult to get top placement in, but they also won’t generate you targeted traffic.

A prospect approached me recently for help with a coaching site. This site promotes teleseminars to help clients implement life changes described in various motivational books. This prospect initially said that he wanted to be “Number One” on a search for “books”.

I’d suggest this would be a virtually impossible challenge for any search engine optimizer. But in addition, someone searching for “books” is probably really looking for Amazon, or Barnes & Noble, and not my client’s teleclasses. He could spend a lot of money for very few qualified leads.

2. You need to speak the language of your visitors

We all talk “geekspeak” – it’s often second nature to us within our industry or area of expertise. And it’s easy to forget that our prospects don’t always use the same terminology. One of the most difficult areas in copywriting that I see is when technology sales people are trying to describe their products to a non-technical market – the result is usually incomprehensible!

But there’s also the jargon that we use as a matter of pride, or because we’ve lost touch with how our markets think of us.

I worked recently with an association of plastic surgeons. They had their member database on their Web site, and wanted to attract visitors there to find a local practitioner.

Their “Number One” target keyword for the search engines was “rhinoplasty”. Well, I can only spell this because I just looked it up for this article – but usually you and I in the general public would never think of that – of course, we’d be searching for . . . “nose jobs”!

The surgeons didn’t like this at all from an academic standpoint. But they had to concede the point when I presented evidence on most common searches from the old Overture’s Search Term Suggestion Tool .

3. It’s very passive marketing . . .

My most pressing argument for not spending too much time on free search engines is that it’s a very passive form of marketing. You’re relying on a prospective visitor waking up in the morning, and realizing that they need something that you might provide. Then, you’re relying on them choosing the precise keywords that you’ve targeted for search engine optimization. It’s a fairly hit or miss business.

When do I disagree with myself?

There are some exceptions to all this. I do believe that search engines are well worth it when you have a niche product or service with extremely unambiguous and well-defined keywords.

For example, an audience member in one of my recent programs was working on a Web site to sell some incredibly advanced yoyos. I did recommend a search engine strategy to him – after all, if someone puts in “yoyo” as a search term, they’d almost certainly be a qualified lead!

What do I do instead?

That’s the subject of numerous other articles. To get you started, you can find twenty-three of my favourite techniques in my free tipsheet.

But in short, I much prefer aggressively seeking out sites where your target markets are likely to be reading, or searching for information. That way, you can proactively bring your ideas, products and services to them, in places where they are much more likely to be receptive and interested. And there are so many options for different budgets and campaign sizes, both online and offline.

So, are search engines worth it any more?

I’m not advocating ignoring search engines. And I do like the better paid models, such as Overture.

But I do suggest that you should be very clear about how much passive marketing you want to undertake, and whether the product or service that you’re offering lends itself to this.

And if you do decide to optimize your site for search engines, pick the keywords that will be in the mindset of your customers . . . and be willing to settle for “Number Two” sometimes!

© 2003 Philippa Gamse. All rights reserved.