SEO – Google The 800-Pound Gorilla

When you’re targeting free search engine traffic by being listed high in their results on keywords related to your webpages, Google is usually the No.1 priority.

This diagram shows why:

Google gets the lion’s share of the search market with over 70% of searchers preferring it to all other engines.

Every results page has only 10 listings, but there could be millions of pages of results. Your goal, if you want to get free traffic from the search engines, is to get within the top 10 listings.

If a search engine is accurate, the Top 10 listings will provide many searchers what they’re looking for. This saves the searchers time and effort and provides him with a great search experience. When this happens, most searchers don’t go beyond the 1st page (top 10) – so if your webpages somehow ended up within the top 20 (2nd page), or top 30 (3rd page) – you’ll get very few visitors, if at all.

Now within the Top 10 results, the top 3 listings get the lion’s share of the eyeballs. In the diagram below, the red spots indicate where most searchers’ eyes are looking at (the “hot spots”) – with the most eyeballs for the No.1 listing, followed by No.2, then No.3 and so on. The blue areas indicate the cool spots – with the fewest eyeballs:

Google’s results are usually accurate enough to satisfy most searchers – and the vast majority of them don’t venture beyond the top 10. Thus it’s crucial that your webpages at least end up in the Top 10 of the search results for keywords you’re targeting, if not the Top 5, or the Top 3 – even the No.1 position itself.

Now that we’ve established the top search engine to target, and how you must get into the Top 10 listings – it’s time to see what you must do to get there.

There is a hard way, and there is an easy way.

Most people are doing things the hard way.

Very few people are doing things the easy way.

I’ll be showing you both!

Sen Ze