High Google Rankings:
Frequency vs. Positioning
Copyright © 2004,
Ulli G. Niemann
There's an assumption that the higher a ranking or positioning you have with major search engines; the more people will beat a path to your web doorstep.
But based on my experience, that's simply not true! There's another factor that is just as important and may actually drive more traffic to your site.
This big secret is frequency: The number of times your name appears when someone enters a key word in a search engine. I believe that the more times you appear in a search, the greater the likelihood of someone actually clicking through to your site.
How do you get frequent listings in search engines?
Write quality content articles.
I'm an investment advisor and a while ago I started a second
web site (www.successful-investment.com) to
promote my weekly mutual fund newsletter, capture potential prospect
names and
house a library of my published articles.
To get people to the site, I naturally wanted to move up
in the search engine food chain. I did the usual meta
tag things, but that didn't cause my rise in the rankings. What
did cause it
surprised me.
One of my first articles ("Do
lifestyle funds provide greater
security?") was
submitted to some 30 article banks and web sites. Many
of them reprinted it, which increased the number of appearances
of my name associated with the topic. Since many of
these sites were already ranked high on the search engines, I
rode on their success.
Searching Google for "Lifestyle
funds" produces
over 3 million
results. On the first page of results my article is listed
four times, on the second page three times and on page three it's
listed three times, and so on. If you were searching this term,
with that much presence you would not likely overlook me.
In addition to generating hits
on my web site from potential clients, my frequent listing in search
engines yielded another
benefit: I was invited to CNNfn's Hollywood studio
to discuss my article "How to evaluate
load vs. no load mutual funds." They found me by searching Google for "load
vs. no load." That
produced almost 5 million results and on the first page my
article appears three times, on the second three times and on
the third three time as well-and some included my company
listing. I was an authority!
In the past six months I have written and published 17 articles with the key search terms being part of the title. I pretty much get similar results with all of them. Why? I believe quality content is a key.
My core business is "personal
investment management." If you
search that on Google you will get about 11 million results.
I currently rank number 8. And that's among the 'who's who' in
investment management, companies that invest big bucks to manipulate
getting high rankings on search engines.
Can I improve on that? Probably
not by trying to manipulate positioning, but definitely with frequency.
And that comes
from writing articles.
Now, maybe you like this idea but think you can't write
quality articles. I'm not a writer, but my articles get
picked up by e-zines and article banks all the time. How does that
happen?
It's actually simpler than you think.
There are two aspects to writing;
1. the actual content and
2. the writing style.
If you've been in business for any length of time you have a wealth of information that you take for granted but others would love to know about. You should be able to write a 300 to 800 word article about your product or service area. Don't worry about the style; just write quality content that will be helpful to your potential customers.
Although my writing skills are
pretty sharp because I do a lot of writing, I would
not consider them to be on the same level as a professional writer. So I have a second secret to success.
One of my clients is an award winning Hollywood writer and he" enhances" my articles. It's
usually not a lot of work, but at times I need a better transition
from point A to point B. Since
the content is clear and basically organized, he doesn't have
to spend any time researching or "doing
the heavy lifting." He
can devote his attention to enhancing the quality of the
presentation, and that doesn't take long or cost much.
[If you need help with writing you may contact Laren Bright
(punster@earthlink.net) and tell him I sent you.]
I think you will find that writing articles becomes a lot
easier once you have that kind of assistance. It certainly
became stress-free for me when I didn't have to worry about form
and
could concentrate on my long suit: content.
It's hard to beat the results
that my articles have produced for me in terms of exposure, Google
rankings and new clients. Given
these facts I propose that frequency beats positioning anytime.
Try it and see if it boosts your rankings and your business.
Ulli Niemann is an investment advisor and has written about
methodical approaches to investing for over 10 years. He is
stepping out of his comfort zone to write about different areas
in which he has gained experience that can assist others. You
can reach him at: http://www.successful-investment.com
