How To Get Ranked In Search Engines
How important is it to get ranked in search engines?
You can have a great restaurant that makes the most delicious meals, but if nobody knows you exist, then you’ll never sell as much as a pretzel.
So you can have a beautiful site, positively crammed with sage-like content, written so lyrically Shakespeare’s own ghost looks on enviously, but if no one on the net knows it’s there, no will follow up your reviews and recommendations and click the affiliate links in your articles. How can they, if they never see them?
You to have to get those search engines results.
Follow your nose
Now, in this town with your restaurant, it has a very large population, and you know that some of these people, at any give time, will be hungry. Stands to reason. So they’ll be looking for some place to eat. Which is great – because that’s your business – feeding people.
Except it’s a very big town with lots of streets leading off from the city centre. All paths branch from there, and it is called Google Square. It is the place where everyone who comes to town starts from.
And where our hungry people will be found sniffing for what it is they like the smell of best in the air.
So you throw open your doors and windows, and you let the enticing aroma of your cooking waft out on the wind…
Much you like you must season your content articles with the right keywords topping (header) to catch the interest of those hungry for the information you prepare.
That enticing smell, those carefully crafted keywords, will bring people – otherwise known as traffic – to your site.
But you have to be a bit creative, do a bit of work, because just plainly stating what you’re writing about or reviewing, may well be the most obvious keyword phrase. Whilst it will have stratospheric search numbers, it will probably have a QSR to match. Meaning, your golden post will sink like a gold bar dropped into an ocean.
What is QSR? It is “Quoted Search Results.” The results or page listings, returned by Google in response to your search query.
If the QSR is too high, there will simply be too many page listings returned for your post to rank anywhere near the beginning. Never mind page one, I mean just somewhere in the twenty or so pages Google usually returns (i.e. out of 1,250,000 results).
Getting the ‘write’ tools
The good folks at Wealthy Affiliate include a keyword search tool as part of membership, plus comprehensive training on how to use it.
In the past I used a Chrome browser QSR plug-in, in conjunction with Google’s own keyword tool in Adwords… it worked, but it was way work than I needed to do; bouncing and back and forward between screens, typing and retying, jumping to the end of Google results to get the QSR… it was painful and time wasting.
WA’s tool had immediacy. Suddenly I had something that could give me the answers I was looking for in seconds, and perform the additional digging on related keywords for me at the same time. That made life a LOT easier and productive. Plus the additional tips & tricks they teach at WA, that even on my extended Google safaris into keyword planning, I hadn’t yet come across, were invaluable.
That’s only the crust on the pie, though. You have to meat underneath it or no one’s going to eat it or come back for more.
The meat is your content
What’s content? What you’re reading right now. It’s just your post; what you’re talking about; your personal letter to your reader.
A lot of people get needlessly hung up on that. You don’t need to be an English professor or F. Scott Fitzgerald, you just need your own authentic voice, written as though you’re conversing in person. Too formal and it’s off putting. Reading should be fun and informative, not a college lecture.
You do, however, have to write more than a few lines. These are articles, not text messages. There is some etiquette to follow. Plus, if you just throw up a few lines provided by an affiliate merchant and paste in a few pictures, that’s going to look like exactly what it is: a piece of crap sales pitch lazily hocking some random product.
You’ve no doubt come across these sites – and swiftly departed them too because there was no value in them. These are what were known as “thin affiliates,” and once upon a time they were popular because you could get Google to place these noticeboard sites in rankings. A few correctly chosen keywords, and a few pictures, et volia – an affiliate marketing page on page one of results.
Just by the sheer numbers hitting it due to high rank, the hope was it’d pay off with someone clicking through on something.
Not anymore folks
Well, thankfully for everyone (except the people doing that), those days are over. Google will punish your posts if you do that and they will never see the light of day! And quite right. These days the name of the game is “quality content” and that means writing something original, and something helpful to the reader.
Because Google is interested in the reader’s experience, not your billboard site.
Like your niche because you will be writing on it daily!
So you have to do more than just be a billboard, you have to be a review magazine. Think Which of your niche. You have to know your niche and write knowledgeably on it. That is made so much easier if you do know your niche!
Don’t choose a niche just based on commissions. “Hey, car insurance comes with $50 a pop per commission!” Your site will just sink without trace if you don’t know your subject. You don’t have to PhD know it, just possess a genuine interest, and some actual experience of it.
Remember, you could be writing for some time on it. That won’t be very pleasant if you find yourself struggling to say anything after three posts. And if you have to go off and do a day’s research or more before each post, you’re not going to keep that up long term.
You have to write regularly too. Google loves new content. If you let that slip, stop posting, then your site and all your Google rankings, and hard work with it, will slid too. You can’t just throw up a site, some links, a post, and hope that’ll make money: it won’t.
So be realistic. You’ll enjoy writing about what you know, and once you start, you’ll be surprised by how much knowledge you do possess.
And that’s it. That’s the mechanics of it. Wash, rinse and repeat.
Sounds easy, don’t it?
Looks easy. I could do that. If I wanted.
So does going to the gym two or three times a week, an hour out of your life each time. But a lot of people don’t…
Because the hard part is in the disciple. Keeping your site updated with content, and not all of it will be sales, it will as much informative as it is commercial (probably more so), and keeping going when it seems like you’re just posting into the void; that no one’s reading or cares. Ignoring that and ploughing on, continuing to build out your site with more articles and pages, improving and polishing it up…watching, waiting, for that trickle of traffic to start to flow…
That’s the hard part. That’s the part of crossing the desert, having faith in the map and trusting that the oasis will be over the next dune.
But if you stick to the route and follow it through.
That route is well laid out by Wealthy Affiliate. But like the proverbial horse, they can only tell you where the water is, they can’t make you drink it.
You got to put the whip to your own back.
Any questions, let me know below.
A.
