How to Claim Your Stake in Prime Internet Real Estate
Indeed, when it comes to driving traffic to your free website, the key is “location, location, location” in Google’s search engine rankings. Research has shown that more than half of all searches result in a click through to the top three results on page one. Let’s be realistic. How often do you actually click through to page two or page three of the search results? A peek at the web page titles and summaries shows that the further down the page you go, the less relevant the results are to your original search query.
Keeping Up With Google
So if you want to maximize traffic to your free website from the search engines, then you will need to maximize your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. SEO is the lifeblood for getting ranked on the web and can affect your website’s traffic, which in turn has a direct impact on your website’s revenue potential. Learning how to optimize your web page for SEO is one of the single most important tasks that any website owner must perform. Of course you could pick up a book and learn the basics of SEO. There is one major problem with doing that, however. Reading a couple of books about SEO is not enough. The Internet is constantly evolving. Take the search engine Google, for example, which holds the greatest market share in the search engine market. Google is constantly refining its proprietary search engine algorithm to make sure its search results are the most relevant to what the user is searching for. Your personal website could be ranked #1 for a particular keyword today. But tomorrow, Google can yank your site off the first page and bury it down several pages deep in its search results, if it changes its ranking algorithm.
So you may be wondering how on earth you could possibly expect to be successful at ranking your free website, driving traffic to it, and generating revenue from it, if you are at the mercy of Google’s ever-evolving search engine ranking algorithm. The answer is to keep up with the latest developments in the SEO industry and apply them to your web page design. It can be challenging to keep up with Google, being that by the time you figure out how to rank your website, Google makes a change to its ranking algorithm again. But, for the most part, you can expect that any changes Google makes to its algorithms are meant to improve the user experience. (Otherwise, if people find that Google is constantly returning lousy search results, people will get turned off from Google and turn to another search engine for answers. And Google clearly won’t allow that to happen.)
The Important Role That SEO Blogs Play
The best way to keep up with developments in SEO is to read SEO blogs. There are thousands of blogs out there that focus on the latest trends, the latest developments, the latest tools to make your life easier, and the latest challenges in the world of SEO. For example, we are seeing that Google is starting to integrate video, shopping, and news results into a single search engine result view. How does affect your ability to keep your free website ranked highly? Or, for example, we are seeing that Google had recently introduced Google Suggest, which basically displays suggested searches as you key in your search terms, and Google Instant, which displays search results before you even finish typing in your query. You may have fired up Google expecting to type one query, but you end up accepting the suggested query that Google delivers instead or clicking on the search results that you find based on an incompletely typed search query. How does this affect SEO?
If you don’t have time to keep up with all of the different SEO blogs, you can always subscribe to their RSS feeds and receive updates directly into your browser or any other RSS feeder program.
So if you want to defeat your website’s competition, then it is extremely important that you keep up to date with the latest SEO trends, by reading SEO blogs. Don’t wait until your free website gets delisted from Google’s index or loses its ranking before you learn what’s new in the world of SEO. By then it is too late. So to stay one step ahead of the competition: read your SEO blogs.
