I was emailing back and forth with a client the other day. I won’t get into his particular situation, but he was experiencing the same frustration with early search engine rankings that all new website owners feel. It’s very common and it’s understandable. You get the ball rolling, invest in a brick-and-mortar storefront, a virtual storefront, short-term growth initiatives, and then the output doesn’t match your input.
I usually have to educate new business owners that the search engines have evolved to trust and promote known quantities and hedge a bit on unknown ones. Once your site has been crawled enough times to register as reliably about an identifiable topic in an identifiable market, it’ll get more play. Changing a lot of things prematurely will just prolong this. Minor tweaking is okay, but you don’t need to keep editing and expecting big results early. Google loves new content, but new means additional more than altered. If you have to alter content, make sure you’re using Google’s web services to drive your changes and enhace your campaigns.
If you’re trying to climb a little higher in search engine rankings, here are few things you could do now to improve your authority:
- Get respected websites associated with your community to link to you
- Get respected websites within your industry to link to you
- Get mentioned in the media, and reciprocate that link from your website
It’s okay to have links from unrelated sites bringing traffic to your site, but it can confuse the searchbots as to what industry/community you’re in. The searchbots actually crawl from those sites to yours and vice versa, analyzing their content, to better determine what your site is about. If you need to sew unrelated links into your copy, you can tell the search engines to ignore the content on those sites by adding this simple HTML code to your link:
<a href=”http://www.yourlink.com” rel=”nofollow”>your link</a>
This is the low-hanging fruit of search engine optimization. These tactics help, but it’s all very dynamic and subject to change depending on whatever xxx-site developers, phishers, scrapers, and spammers are doing today that search engine programmers will have to combat tomorrow.
