This is the first of a study of methods to obtain good rankings in Google, Yahoo and Microsoft search engines.

There are really only four ways of getting good rankings, five if you include the most important ingredient of all patience. Staying at the top is an ongoing process, like top athletes if you stop your ratings will start to fall.

Here’s the list:

1. Good Product
2. Content
3. Linking
4. SEO
5. Patience

Content and First Impressions
First you have to get the traffic to pass your window. Once upon a time the way to do this was position, the location of your shop in the high street and how good your display window looked. The idea was to attract attention and draw the potential customer into your shop. There same principle applies to stores particularly in shopping malls. A good position will bring in a lot of traffic without any advertising, which is why the price of prime locations can be very high.

In today’s internet marketing world a home page or landing is your shop window. You have between 1 to 3 seconds to pull in the visitor before she moves on. You have to get the sales message across very quickly and be very clear and decisive.

1. What are you selling?
2. The benefit over your competition.
3. Why should the visitor buy from you?

The landing page does not have to be the most eloquent design, remember Google’s site is very plain.