There are three major things that effect how search engines rank your site:
- Traffic
- Inbound Links
- Page Content and Coding
The reality is that if you don’t have decent traffic, it’s unlikely that google will see your site as relevant. If no one (of quality) is linking to you then you’re potential to satisfy the needs of google users is even lower. And finally if the content on your pages is not identical to what searchers are looking for there will be other sites that will appear first.
While this seems like bad news, it’s the situation every website owner is in so you’re not alone!
So what to do? With 65% market share google should be your main target. We recommend taking the long view and starting from the bottom up. Decide the 10 key phrases where you’d like to appear. Check out who appears in natural search results for these terms and how you measure up. Craft your page content to suit the phrases and code your pages with standards in mind. Find sites that should be linking to your content (like bloggers) and pitch them a story chock full of your key phrases.
Over time your page rank will improve. If it’s not improving fast enough, you’ll need to consider purchasing google adwords. As a side note, google says having an adwords campaign doesn’t improve your rank but having a google webmaster account and submitting an XML sitemap to google will help.
