If you were going to pay for a Yellow Pages ad in the phone book, wouldn’t you want to make sure it was listed under the correct subject heading so people could easily find it?
Of course you would. That makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? And wouldn’t you sadly shake your head over a business colleague who failed to do this at all or failed to do it right and wasted a bunch of money and effort? We’re such great “armchair quarterbacks,” aren’t we?
You would be even further flabbergasted if your colleague told you with a straight face that getting into the Yellow Pages was a bunch of B.S. and that people who did that sort of thing were scammers.
Let me show you what the new Yellow Pages looks like:
According to Netcraft, as of December 2008 there are roughly 186,727,854 sites online. Note that is sites, not web pages. And that number is higher than November by 1.56 million. The number of individual web pages can be counted in the billions.
You might wanna start thinking about how you’re going to be found in this particular phone book.
Probably over 90% of the people in this “phone book” haven’t done a single thing to improve their “findability.” Not. A. Thing. In fact, UK web hosting provider Fasthosts (www.fasthosts.co.uk) announced on Monday that it has released a new study which reveals that 71% of web users are unaware of how Internet search engine results are compiled. A percentage of those web users also run online businesses. Only 29% “are aware that search results are generated based on the search terms and optimisation techniques used by the individual website owners.”
Which means the advantage instantly goes to the ones who do something to help themselves be found. But out of that group, most of them aren’t doing a very good job. So the number of people who really know what they’re doing and who are at position number 1 on the first page of Google search results is even smaller still. Those sites get the lion’s share of the traffic, the clicks, and… the money (this is the part where you play a cash register ka-ching sound in your mental soundtrack).
Because, you see, in the big Google “phone book”, you can displace other people’s entries! You can muscle your way to the top by being the best listing. Imagine a phone book where the listings were ordered by customer response.
That, my friends, is what Google is.
I’ve made available a home learning program that will help you correctly create a “yellow pages ad” in the big Google “phone book,” and it will be focused exclusively on the self-hosted WordPress blog platform. It will be called WordPress SEO Secrets.