Everyone wants to drive people to their websites, for some people this is to increase sales in an ecommerce platform or an online shop, or to increase awareness of a brand, company, charity or organisation along with the goods and services that it can offer. There are many different methods that are being used to achieve this goal with viral marketing and social media campaigns being the current flavour of the month. These can both be very effective methods to drive a lot of traffic to your site in a short period, however in most cases you will see a sharp peak in traffic which quickly drops off once the viral has finished or the push on the social networks is no longer being pushed as hard. Videos are increasingly being used to drive promote companies and sites and to be able to share a lot of knowledge in a relatively short time.
These methods can be great at promoting a site, however there is one thing that can always generate traffic for you and this is your search engine rank or position. Recent research by Chitika has shown just how much of a difference moving up the results can have on the amount of people visiting your site. Their figures clearly demonstrate how important it is to be on the first page of results with less than 24% of all the traffic in the study coming from results that were below position 5 and they note that making the single step from the top of page 2 to the bottom of page 1, a change of just 1 spot in the rankings has the biggest jump, percentage-wise in traffic.
Recently I have been having to do some health checks on some of the sites we manage for our clients in order to identify some of the things that can be holding them back in their attempts to climb up the results pages and I have some good news for you. I will show you some of the things that could be holding you back to one degree or another and how to solve these issues so you can watch your site move up the rankings in not just Google, but also improve your position in Yahoo and get better results in Bing.
Over the next couple of posts we are going to go over some of the common issues that I have found holding sites back and how to make sure these are not holding you back and limiting your site to that bottom 25% of traffic from the search engines.
Check back tomorrow for the first half of our action plan and in the meantime here are a couple of book suggestions that will also help you move up the results and claim your top 5 result
Continue on to part 2 to see How can I rank better
