South West eCommerce

We've discussed this topic many times before, but it's still one of the most common questions we get asked: "How can I make sure my website shows up in the search results?"

First of all, lets explain how the results are shown. If you go to a major search engine like www.google.com.au or www.yahoo.com.au and do a search, you'll notice the results are split into 2 main sections.

The first type of listing appears at the very top and also down the right hand side. These are usually called "Sponsored Listings" or something similar, and are "Pay Per Click" advertisements. This means that the advertisements are actually free to list there, but the advertiser pays each time someone clicks on them (eg. $0.40 per click). This might sound like a recipe for a big advertising bill, but the advertiser actually has a lot of control over it, such as what keywords to appear for, how much to bid, how much in total to spend, and so on. The system knows if ads are repeatedly clicked on by the same person and only charges once, and the ad is automatically removed once the advertiser reaches their budget (eg. $3 per day).

Besides the Sponsored Listings, there is also another section of free results (often called Organic results). These are the listings that come from the database of the search engine, and are the sites that the engine feels are most relevant to your search. So if you've typed in "gardening equipment", it shows the most relevant websites in it's database for gardening equipment. How does it work it out? Well there's around 100 factors or more that the engine takes into account, including the text on your page, and the title of your website, but one of the most important factors of all is link popularity.

Link popularity means that the more websites linking to yours, the more popular the search engine will think your site is, and therefore the higher it will rank you. So if your site has 3 other websites linking to it, but your competitor has 1000 sites linking to their website, the search engine will think that your competitor's site is more important/popular, and therefore normally rank it higher (taking into account other factors, of course). Note that it's the number of links coming in, not out, that is relevant.

Ever done a search for accommodation? Notice how all the top sites listed in the free section are the major travel portals? This is because these portals have thousands and thousands of websites linking to them and are large, well established sites. So the search engines place a higher importance on those sites and rank them higher.

So back to the question of "How can I make sure my website shows up in the search results?". You have no control over the free listings section. Although you can optimise your website to suit the preferences of the major search engines, and work on increasing your link popularity, at the end of the day you can't guarantee that your website will appear on the first page. Over time, as you work on increasing your inbound links, your ranking should increase, but you can never guarantee exactly where you will appear.

The only part of the first page you have control over is those Sponsored Listings. This is a way for small businesses to compete with the larger, more established portal sites by allowing them to be on the first page of results immediately, yet only pay each time they get a visitor.

To find out more about Pay Per Click Advertising, see our Search Engine Marketing page.