Why Your Website isn't Ranked Higher: The Short Answer
If you’d like to do PPC (Pay-Per-Click) DVI Web Works can manage your campaign for you. This gets you the fastest results. The idea is that you sign up with Google (via their AdWords program) and/or Yahoo (via their Overture program) and bid on keywords and key phrases relevant to your business. If your bid is higher than the other guy’s for a given keyword or key phrase (like “direct mail”), your ad will appear before his in the sponsored listings (above and to the right on Google, for example). If someone clicks through to your website, you pay Google/Yahoo the amount that you bid. One nice thing about PPC is that you can set a maximum budget per day and turn it off and on whenever you please.
Unfortunately, many small businesses find themselves in extremely competitive marketplaces without any geographic restrictions and “the other guy” may have more money than you to spend doing PPC.
Why Your Website isn't Ranked Higher: The Long Answer (and it won’t be long enough!)
As you also probably know, not all listings on Google/Yahoo/MSN/etc. are PPC. The main listings are called organic and they appear as a result of a page being mathematically highly-ranked either legitimately (good) or illegitimately (a bad idea because you can get banned from the search results). Rankings happen on the search engine’s own schedule as it spiders the web and it can take many months to show up. There is no way to bulrush your way in to the results as you can with PPC and a high maximum bid. The art of making web pages that search engines like is called “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO).
 So how do you get highly-ranked? There are many, many good answers to this question…indeed many books and seminars are being sold right now on this very topic. Nearly all of the traditional answers are at least partially correct: make sure your website copy is good and that you have plenty of it, make sure your pages are correctly-titled, make sure there are no W3C errors, make sure you have accurate meta tags,, etc., etc.
Now here’s an example of something seen recently on an SEO website: it is rumored that Google ranks a website higher in proportion to the number of years your domain is registered! And this might factor into Google’s formula at a rate of .005%. It might. Why don’t we know for sure? Because Google/Yahoo/MSN/etc. don’t publish their algorithms in order to prevent people trying to “game” the search engines. The ultimate bad example would be a page that is supposedly for a charitable organization that really dumps you onto a gambling website. You can probably think of many more examples.
If you know how to get better rankings for your website, chances are so does your competition...unless you’re in a business that is very niche. Unfortunately you may be in a market segment with loads of online competition. If we sold special gloves for Norwegian forest cats that prevented frostbite we could build a website that would get ranked #1 within a few days.
DVI Web Works is a good example of a very competitive business model. Web developers all want to be highly-ranked because that’s one of the obvious ways to showcase their talents. But in a race where everyone wants to be first for “web design” (or choose from a zillion others) there can obviously only be one first place, one second place, one third (and so on). Thus, the idea is to “specialize” on more specific keywords. We initially optimized our website for “spa web design”. For the results of that effort, type it into Google. This is a niche that DVI Web Works’ve developed for ourselves based on the reality that DVI Web Works weren’t going to get “web design” or anything close to it.
Many Search Engine Optimization consultants say they’ll get you #1 rankings, and they can, but it’s an illusion because the only phrase you get highly-ranked for is your own business name. Try typing in your own business name into Google. You may already have a "#1 ranking"!
The best way to get organic rankings is to get other ranked and relevant websites to link to you. This idea formed the very foundation of Google's Page Rank algorithm in the beginning. If you know of a website that might link to you (say, the Direct Marketing Association or your local Chamber of Commerce) it would be a good idea to ask if they would link to you. In our experience this is difficult unless you’re paying someone (such as joining the Chamber of Commerce), which is why it carries so much weight in the rankings. People often “trade” links too (I’ll link to you if you link to me).
Unfortunately this kind of legwork usually must be done by the client (that’s you) in order to have any chances of succeeding. And even when you do get these links, the search engines still have to spider the site that’s pointing to you and re-rank you. That doesn’t happen overnight.
Assuming you don’t have the budget to PPC for a very common phrase, one good idea would be to start a PPC campaign and optimize on the types of products or services that you offer which can be made more specific. For example, instead of "direct mail" you could optimize for “direct mail golfers” to advertise your golfers direct mailing list. While you likely have products or services that are more general, you can still figure out where other keywords and phrases could be used to target your potential clients. Your own knowledge of your business and your clients is your most effective weapon here. What is the profile of your “classic” customer? Obviously this is Marketing 101 stuff…funny how SEO kind of comes back to that, but that’s what the search engines want.
SEO is a wide-ranging and well-studied topic, but it’s also a bit of a black art because the search engines don’t want to tell you what to do. Ultimately, they want the web pages to “speak for themselves” and be relevant to the search terms entered in order to best serve the public.
Don’t you love opening a can of worms? ;-)
Contact DVI Web Works today at 310.860.5176 or contact us for more information.
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