Do you have visions of high Google rankings dancing in you head? If you are, then you’re not alone, because high visibility on Google’s search results pages can make the difference between being found on the Internet by prospective customers — or being as accessible as the needle in the proverbial haystack.
The ongoing quest by web site owners to improve rankings is a worthy one, but it needs to be tempered by patience and a steady, methodical approach to ecommerce web development, which would include content creation and acquiring lots of outside links. Why get other web sites to post a link to your site, preferably with relevant keywords being used as the clickable text? To eliminate the long-winded explanation and cut to the chase: Google tends to rank sites higher that have a lot of links pointing to them — especially well-established, respected sites that are similar in topic to the one they’re linking to.
I’d hazard a guess that Google has spent millions of dollars, and untold man hours (person hours?) developing, refining, and obfuscating a complex formula — “algorithm”, actually — that determines which sites and pages on the Web get to indexed on the first page or two of search engine results. Those in the CNET News Google has about a 65% share of the market, with Yahoo and Microsoft capturing a 17% and 11% share, respectively. The remaining two search engines with a notable marketplace share are the Ask Network, with a 3.8% share, and AOL, with 2.3%. So Yahoo and the others shouldn’t be ignored in your search engine marketing; but now, and for the foreseeable future, it looks like Google will remain the leader of the pack.
In December of 2010 both Google and Bing have come out and said their search results are being influenced by Twitter and Facebook. Google calls it “Author Authority” and Bing uses the term “Social Authority.” Back in April of 2010, Facebook released its “Like Button” feature as part of its world dominance strategy. In the first week over 50,000 websites added the new feature. Some SEO experts believe “page likes” will have a similar effect on search engine rankings as back links.