There's no such thing as a free launch

Search engines have now become such an integral part of the Internet that is easy to overlook the simple fact that the likes of Google and Yahoo are all businesses in their own right. Few businesses would expect their local newspaper or radio station to give them free advertising with nothing in return, but this is exactly what most of us expect from search engines.

No matter how great you think your site is you don't have a right to get free traffic from search engines.

The science bit

We all want to be on the first page of the results for whatever target phrases we choose, but the reality is that not everyone can be. If the phrase that you choose to target has 4 million competing pages on Google then the reality is that only the top 0.00025% are going to be listed on page one, leaving the owners of the other 99.99975% feeling disappointed. Even being in the top 1% (an fantastic claim in almost any other field of business) would leave you languishing on page 1,000 well out of site of your potential audience.

If you want to improve on that position then the harsh reality is that you had better be doing something that your competitors aren’t.

The search engine’s perspective

The aim of a search engine is to return the most relevant results for whatever search is entered. Doing this successfully makes for happy users, which in turn keeps them coming back to see the various paid adverts and other revenue generating services that make the likes of Google, Yahoo and MSN such profitable enterprises.

Remember: The end user is the search engine’s customer, not the site owner.

So what can I do?

The good news is that if you are competing against 4 million other pages the chances are that a large proportion of those pages are not actively trying to improve their results. This means that any investment on your part (either in your own time, or financially if you prefer to hire someone else to do it) can see large improvements in results.

Of course, the higher up the rankings you get the more competitive it becomes, but significant results can be achieved with a relatively conservative amount of effort.

The most important step you can make to put you ahead of the majority of competing results is to decide that this is an investment that you are willing to make. Deciding that search engine positioning is something that you are willing to invest either time or money into will immediately give you an advantage over the millions of personal, poorly managed or out of date and abandoned sites that clog up the results for any search you can think of.

- 09th November 2005

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