Location. Location. Location.
This idiom is just as true of your website’s ranking on Google, as it is for the value of real estate based on geographic location. The success or failure of your website is tied, for better or for worse, to how well it ranks on Google’s search engine results depending on the keywords or phrases that people search for
The Relationship Between Search Engine Rank and Website Traffic
You could create your own website with all kinds of fancy graphics and rich features using a free website builder, but if nobody knows about it, if nobody is able to find it, then what good is it? A website is only as good as the amount of traffic that it receives.
If you don’t get any traffic (or enough traffic) to your website, then you will fail to derive a number of benefits for yourself or for your business:
- Less traffic means fewer sales conversions.
- Less traffic means fewer newsletter sign ups.
- Less traffic means less “buzz” being generated for your website.
So if you want to improve any of the above three areas, then you will need to increase the amount of traffic that your website receives. There are many ways to increase traffic to your web site, but perhaps the most important and the most significant method would be to increase your website’s ranking on Google.
What Does It Mean For Your Website To Be Ranked on Google?
What exactly does it mean to be “ranked” on Google for one or more specific keywords or phrases? Simple. Simply type in a particular keyword or phrase into Google. You want your site to show up in the top 10 results, on the first page. Better yet, you want it to rank as close as possible to the top, preferably within the top 3. That is prime real estate. That is where the vast majority of people will ever bother clicking on, from Google’s search results.
So the question arises, how do you get your free website to show up in the top 3 results for any given search? Google uses its own proprietary algorithm to make this determination, but what we do know is that your site’s ranking is based on relevance. If someone searches for “sushi recipes”, Google will rank your site depending on how relevant it thinks your site is to the phrase “sushi recipes”.
How To Determine How High Your Website Is Ranked On Google
The first step to improving your website’s ranking, is to be able to figure out how high your website is already ranked on Google, to begin with. So how do you do that?
One way is to simply type in a particular search phrase into Google and see if your website shows up anywhere in the search results. Of course this could be an extremely tedious process. How do you know what keywords your website will rank for, and on what page it might show up? Some keywords have millions of search results, after all!
Google Webmaster Tools provide an easy way to accurately determine what keywords your site is ranked for and how high your site is ranked for them on Google. You can use it to proactively monitor your website’s Google ranking on a daily basis.
How To Improve Your Website’s Rank on Google
Okay so now that you know how to determine your site’s ranking in Google, how do you actually go about improving it? This involves a science known as “search engine optimization”, or SEO, for short. You can optimize the content of your web page so that Google will give it a high ranking for a particular keyword. That is what is known as “on-page optimization”. Then there is also something known as “off-page optimization”. This referrers to the act of building a network of relevant links that point to your website.
Because Google ranks you based on your relevance, it measures the relevance of links that are pointing to your website, that originate from other websites. Each link to your website is like a vote being cast in your favor. The more (relevant) inbound links you have to your website, the higher your web page will rank on the Google search results for any given particular keyword.
