Snakes and Ladders
You’re in the lead holding on to the top placement. Your competition is sneering at you from below as they try and climb the ladder to a higher placement. You feel great until you make a bad move, then the snakes bite and down the grid you go. You have lost your placement and need to regain and climb the ladder once more. This is exactly how search engine placement is for website owners. One minute you are riding high above the foe, and then with a few changes to your website or your competitors suddenly everything is different and you find yourself looking up in remorse.
Getting top placement is not always a quick and easy thing to do. Often search engines can take a long time to properly index and display your changes. For the guy sitting in the top placement this is some extra padding for him since he might have a longer time frame to sit on the throne. However for the guy trying to overtake the throne it’s going to be a bit of work. I have often seen Google take up to 8 weeks to reflect the changes that were made on a website. I have also seen the changes reflected in a matter of days.
When looking for a good search engine expert (the person tweaking your website to get better results), look for a great track record. Since you might be in a long term relationship with your search engine expert, you need to ensure they know what they are doing. If they don’t know what they are doing they could actually cause you more damage and money then you might realize. I have some in some cases seen websites actually get banned from search engines due to bad practices that search engines frown upon. The last thing you want to happen is to get snaked by your search engine expert.
Many of the search engines don’t tell you what exactly you need do in order to get the top placement. How could they? Not everyone can have the number one placement! Also search engines make millions of dollars on people buying ads because they can’t achieve the number one placement. Search engines do offer some useful information on what not to do. The aspect of what to do can really only be achieved by experts. Since this scenario is unique to your search phrase, your competition and your website. It would be impossible to blanket everyone with 3 easy steps to achieve top placement.
There is a good rule of thumb to use when doing Search Engine Optimization. We call this comparing the top ten. Since the search engines don’t tell you what you need to do, we can only analyze the current top 10 websites and then compare them to your website. There are at least 61 different categories that you should use to compare. A few major ones are: other websites linking to you, the percentage of keywords used in your content (should between 1-3%), keywords that are not listed in your content (if so remove them), slow server, and simple navigation. These are just a few things we look at when doing a top ten comparison. This would be the first step I would suggest when doing your optimization. Most of the minor fixes can be addressed and help you achieve better placement right away.
If you have been struggling to get that top placement and have felt like you can’t seem to climb the ladder, please contact us to see how we can help your company by running a top ten placement check. We will run a top ten check on your website and show you what you need to do to get better results.