Since the beginning of this year I decided to test my SEO skills and see if I could generate organic traffic. From the beginning and even now, it’s all been a numbers game. How much traffic did I see that day? How could I increase my traffic? I wanted to do this with only search traffic, so I had to learn how to rank my websites and their pages. If it wasn’t already obvious to you, Google owns the majority share of the search market.
Google controls the market share
Owning almost 85% of the market, makes it clear that I should be focusing on making sure my sites were properly optimized for Google’s search engine. I am not going to go in depth on how to properly optimize your site, but you should know the basics:
- Your page’s title, H1, meta-description, and URL – should all be targeted towards you keyword.
- Unique/frequently updated content. I always shoot for about 500 words per articles on my sites.
- Quality backlinks pointing to your webpage.
If I’ve lost you here, I’ll be covering more of these methods for SEO in greater detail in future posts (keyword research, backlinks, etc.). Anyway, all of the above used correctly will help your web page rank for your targeted keyword. You must remember: Google does not rank your website, but your pages are all individually ranked. I see this as a good thing, since I’ll be able to write individual articles on their own pages, optimize them properly, analyze my competition, do everything I can to outrank my competition, and eventually capture a first page result on Google, hopefully landing in the top 3 results.
You want to be in the top 3 results
Take a look at this graph. You can read more on this data collected by AOL here and if you’ve been in the SEO game for a while now you should be well aware of these numbers. Now this study is dated, but they’re good numbers to go by for your research and just so you see how important it is to land in the top 3 spots for your keyword. Obviously you’ll always want to shoot for the #1 spot, but that where my issue and concern with Google comes into play.
Google preaches to build quality, unique content, and the visitors will come, but what if they don’t? Does Google not realize most niches are now competitive markets for making revenues online and within these competitive markets you will have to deal with authority sites (who are already landing many #1 spots for specific keywords), grey/black hat tactics which your other comeptitors may or may not be using, and the white hat who is doing everything by the books.
So, now you’re aware of you of your competition, you’ve built your website properly, optimized all of the “on page SEO” work possible, you’re indexed in Google, but you’re not get any traffic. Welcome to the game I’ve been playing the last 7 months. Obviously, your site will have to age and gain some respect from Google, but what do you do after the time passes and you’ve been pumping out quality, unique content, as frequently as you can, and you’re still not seeing the results?
Knowing your competition is the beginning
You have to research your competition. You have to get your hands dirty and you have to do what they’re doing, but do it better. Not only must you keep all of your pages properly optimized, you have to target specific keywords, you have to build more backlinks (with appropriate anchor text if possible), and you have to be creative.
Google turned their search engine into a breeding ground for ruthless and cut-throat competition. It’s currently the “top dog” search engine on the block and if you want organic visitors, you have to be ready to play with the big boys. Like most people I hate waiting for results and if you plan on waiting for Google to recognize your site and rank it well, you could be sitting on page 2 (if you’re lucky) or worse for the rest of your site’s lifespan with minimal visitors.
Here’s a great read, Case Study: I Listened to Google and I Failed, on why listening to Google’s guidelines will not always get you the results you’re looking for. If you’re interested in learning the tactics I’ve chosen, researched, and tested, check my blog frequently for future write ups.