Ebits.ie

Posts Tagged ‘Search Engine Optimisation’

The key to success of a website is to make sure

a) you have an atractive and informative site

b) to rank well in the search engines

Before engaging a web marketer or seo firm, make sure to get an accurate baseline report from them to see what your current rankings are if any. This then allows you to have a benchmark or baseline to compare their work. I do this with all my clients as it saves hassle in the long run. We both know how good a job I did since they can see where they were and where they are now.

The second thing you need to be very aware of is google may report your search engine rankings “incorrectly”

This is not a flaw in google rather what they term a feature.  If you have a gmail account or any other account with google your search results may often be shown based on your previous searches or web history. What this means is that although your site may appear in the top ten, this could be based on your surfing history not actually on where it is placed. Can you see the danger here? An seo company shows you your listings in google and within a week they have improved your rankings! Unbeknown to you they are showing you a “personalised” result based on your or their search history!

One way of ensuring you see correct results is to make sure you or they are logged out of their gmail accounts.

The second way is to use a third party piece of software such as Internet Business Promoter which will give you results independent of your search history.

Now a proviso on this. I have found that sometimes reports generated by this software may say I am ranked number 2 for a keyword in google.ie or google.com but when I do a normal google search I don’t find my ranking. Why is this? Since google is running its services over a huge array of servers, it may take time for each server to have the most up to date search rankings. Perhaps each server is updated every 30 minutes. This means that when you go to google.ie you may connect to server 57 the next time you run the same search it may connect to server 557 – which might not have the exact same information.  Note these are my observations over the last number of years.

Bottoms line – always make sure you get fully documented results with screenshots to prove your ranking!