How Long Will it Take For SE Rankings (PR)?
March 16th, 2010
Its not just enough to get indexed by the Search Engines. Traffic (and customers) don’t just come flooding in. Depending on the market industry that you are in, the competition on the web can be enormous. There are many, many industries that are “over-saturated” and there are thousands of similar websites, all trying to get the same customers.
Obviously, if this describes your business, its not possible for you to start a new career now – so what can you do to get more visibility amongst your competitors?
Everyone talks about getting a good Page Ranking (PR) in the search engines – in particular, in Google as it is the biggest SE at present.
What is PR? Well, here’s and example: When a person performs a search at Google they type in a word or phrase for what they are looking for (keywords or keyword phrases). Google then runs away, has a look at its enormous index for those specific words and gets them (and their website links) all together and displays the results of the search on your screen.
Depending on what words are used for a search, Google can return hundreds of results pages and millions / thousands of links! Now, no-one in their right mind is going to go from page to page – right until the very last results page. Statistics have shown that, on average, a person will perhaps look through the first 1-5 pages at the very most. By that time (or before) he decides either to click on one of the results on the page and off he goes to that site, or he tries another search for different keywords.
So, if your keywords do not get you to appear within the first 5 search results pages,
you are doomed to obscurity (and invisibility) on the web!
How do you get onto those first 5 pages?
Firstly, it takes time and effort. Here are a few other ways to achieve a higher ranking:
How competitive are your primary keywords or search phrases?
You may be out of your league – a very small fish in a huge pond. If you have a small business, and are trying to compete in a major (saturated) industry, sorry, chances are you will never see the light of day. I can’t say it would not be possible, but if you are competing in a well-established industry where there are literally 10’s of thousands of inbound links required, and your target keywords is getting millions of searches a month, you need to re-think your whole approach. Your primary business purpose and the keywords will need to be re-evaluated as its likely that your chances of success are slim.
Keyword Competition is hugely important.
This is where it all comes down to “how unique are you”?
The more competitive your market is, the longer you will have to wait for any sort of decent page ranking, and the more inbound links, pages, and fresh content you will need to keep adding to your website.
Try to offer unique information, services, etc. Think really hard about “what makes you different” from the rest out there and exploit this uniqueness as much as possible. Make it a “selling point”.
Have a look at the top 30 sites for your primary keywords (about 3 results pages). If, on average, these ranking sites have 5,000 inbound links and 800 pages on their site. and your site has 2 links and 12 pages, you’re are probably never going to make a go of it. If the top 30 are all the big boys like Kalahari, Amazon, eBay, and the hated Wiki sites, you might want to re-evaluate your approach and tactics.
On the other hand, if you have a unique niche market e.g. selling xyz widgets, found nowhere else in the world, you will be in the pound seats very quickly!
Just another point here, serach results pages (and rankings) do differ from country to country i.e. it depends where the search was initiated from. Talk to your SEO specialist about getting higher rankings within a certain country, if this applies to you.
What is the quantity and quality of the content on your site?
- How much text content to do you have versus photos and graphics? Text RULES!
- How often do you update and add pages to your website (or blog)? Shows the search engines that your site is not stagnant / static. Spiders love to much new, interesting content.
- What is the text to code ratio of your site? In layman’s terms, this is a relatively new algorithm test that is applied to ascertain whether you just have a “pretty picture” site or if there is enough meaty text-based content for the spiders to “eat”!
- SEs are not too excited about a website that has links to tons of other sites (e.g. affiliate marketing web sites) and has no content information of its own. Too many links also lead to you loosing “spider link juice” in that when a spider finds a link, it usually gets detoured to the other site to go and index that OTHER site. So be careful of who you link to and how many outgoing links you have. There are ways around loosing link juice but different SEs handle them differently. Limit yourself to less than 10 per web page.
TEXT CONTENT IS KING!!!
By the way, each page in you website should handle a specific topic and your keywords should ALWAYS be appear on that page as part of the normal text.
Are you a Copy Cat?
If you have “borrowed” or used a lot of duplicate content from other places around the web, the chances are you will not ever see rankings until you replace all that text with something original and meaningful. At this stage there is no “duplicate content” penalty as such, but you are essentially penalizing yourself if you are copying content from somewhere else on the web. SEs tend to look at the first occurence of the content that it finds online and deems that as the original “official” source.
If you have copied content that is already indexed on another website, Google, in particular, will not give you any credit for your copy and your website will simply not get any page ranking for it – and quite rightfully, don’t you think?
How many inbound links does your site have?
A link from another website is a “vote of confidence” for your site. So if you have arranged for another site to put a link to your site (and probably vice versa) this is a very good start.
The more inbound links like this you have, the more “votes” to have and the SEs take note of that. However, the other sites must be “related” in some way to the topic of your site e.g. its no good having an estate agent site and your aunty creates a link back to you from her scrapbooking blog!
Now if it was a link back from a mortgage company or an architect or a garden landscaper, that would really count with the SEs. Getting inbound links is an ongoing process and takes enormous time. There are also “good” and “bad” links. Go to our 247 Highway Website to read more here about linking: Search Engine Optimization
If your Rankings are not appearing
You have to be patient! There can be a number of reasons why your website will never achieve results. If, after at least 1 year, you find that you just not getting anywhere with a good unique keyword, it is possible that your are being penalized in some way by the search engines. This could include the use of “blackhat” SEO tactics, spam and undesirable inbound links from link farms – or just because your site is plain uninteresting! (Hope not! Hasn’t happened to a 247highway client yet!)
Tags: Page Ranking, PR, SEM, SEO
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