Many site owners have great difficulty in getting the search engines to rank their sites. This is not easy for new sites, especially if the domain name is also new. There are many reasons for low ranking, here are a few:

• Age
• Content
• Linking Building and Link Baiting
• Google Sandbox
• Competition

Age

The search engines are suspicious of new sites and need to be convinced the site is not merely a spam site. Google will quickly block a site, if the site pulls in traffic from AdWords for an advertisement for something completely different. This is very common with adult sites. They setup sites with common keywords like mortgage or insurance and highjack your web surfing and lure you to an adult site. They often used misspelled words of well know web sites to “capture” traffic. There are many spam schemes designed to persuade surfers to visit their sites. When the site has been around for a while and ads for the site match the content, the search engines start trusting the site.

Content

Having good quality, interesting content is vital to generate repeat visitors and customers. However, the traffic has to flow into the site first. Updating the site a least once a week will help get your site noticed in the search engines. Here are a few tips:-

• Regularly update News & Events
• Add new products
• Comparison reviews showing advantage of your products over the competition
• Boost about new sales
• Link to your customers sites
• Write interesting articles about your industry.
• Publish in online magazines AND on your site.

Linking

The most important factor in ranking sites is linking. Both incoming and outgoing links are a very important. Having a great site with good content is only part of the battle. Without good links a site has little chance of achieving high ratings.

Before Google (GOOG) came along in 1998 getting your site listed was simple, just register your site with the search engines and build a nice interesting site. Fine with the early search engines, which were directory based and consisted of a list of sites indexed by different categories, the concept of linking was unknown. Google changed the world of search with the introduction of PageRank™. This is how Google describes PageRank™.

“The heart of our software is PageRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to play a central role in many of our web search tools”.

Google is very interested to know who thinks you are friend (inbound links) and who are your friends, (outbound links). Inbound links with high PageRank™ with good authority are worth more than links from lower ranking sites.

Google Sandbox

The Google sandbox effect, where new sites are placed in quarantine for a period of time can be very frustrating for new sites who have invested a lot of time and money in building a site with great content. As explained above age of a site is one of the factors used in the search engine equation. Therefore if you are building a new site, either buy an existing domain name or decide on a new domain name and put up a skeleton home page up on as soon as possible. Then continue to building the rest of the site.

Competition

Unless you are introducing a complete new product or service with little or no competition, there will be many companies who already have established web sites and have good ratings with the search engines. You need a lot of patience and time. It will take at least several months before the site begins to show and maybe a year before your reach the first page!

Before analyzing the process of how to build links, here are a few tips and ideas which will help drive traffic to your site.

1) Add a couple of interesting sites or blogs to your blogroll. The search engines like sites that have good friends. If your friends have high ratings and are willing to link back to you, even better. Don’t forget to link to sites relevant to your business or interest. Google does not like links which are not relevant and yes they do check if the content is compatible. This is a very effective way of networking and should result in increasing your leads and contacts.

2) Read the high ranking blogs in your field and leave comments frequently,

3) Review books you read at sites like Amazon, make sure there is a link back to you site. Select the name of the link with care as the name used will be the same keyword used by the search engines. Do I want to use Shia Leigh or Shwebby. The same review should also be placed on your site. Just be aware that some sites might claim ownership of your review. I suggest writing a short review for Amazon and a full review on your site with a link to the review on Amazon where the visitor can buy the book.

4) Conferences, presentations and trade shows you attend should all be reviewed on your site with a link to the conference or event. Talk about the companies you spoke to, with a link to their web site.

5) Customers and Sales. Many companies do not like to discuss their sales and customers on-line for fear the competition will learn the company’s secrets. However, the more information you can reveal will build confidence and encourage potential customers to “buy” from you. Creating an on-line reputation for quality and integrity is a very important step in step in establishing an on-line business. Do not be afraid to be personal and name employees, particularly when they have done something good like “Bill Jones has developed the greatest idea since sliced bread”.

6) Add photos or video clips they attract more interest than plain text.

7) Contribute top online forums will help attract attention and increase your visibility.

These ideas will help establish your online presence and help you gain a reputation as an expert in your field.

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.