Ever wondered where your website stands in comparison to your competition?
It's fairly easy to find out. Just go to the website www.alexa.com. Alexa provides website information--the most informative being what your website's ranking is on the WWW.
Just enter your website address into the search field at the top and, presto, the search results come up. Ideally with you on top.
Below the home page title and description is your ranking (where your site ranks in comparison to ALL of the sites on the internet) and then a link to your site's information. You can click here for more detailed information.
The mort interesting thing is to make a note of your ranking, then do a search for your competitor's sites and see where you rank in comparison.
If you're ranking number is lower than their's, kudos to you for putting together a good SEO strategy or at least being one step ahead of the competition.
If your number was higher (meaning your rank was lower; i.e. Google is ranked #1, Yahoo #2, etc. You get the idea.), then it may be time to put together a strategy to improve your website's performance on the search engines.
One word of caution. Be wary of contracting with a firm that promises you "top three results on Google" or "first page of Google" within XX amount of days. You pay and they get you there. This generally involves a monthly fee with pay-per-click ads that will definitely get you found on the web, but you will continue to pay, and pay, and pay if you want to maintain those results.
The better idea is to search engine optimize your website so that it captures traffic organically. People actually click on the organic results BEFORE they rely on pay-per-click anyway. So that's ideally where you want to be.
The company you use should talk with you about a strategy that includes keyword discovery to find out what your market is searching to get to your site or your competitor's sites. Optimizing the content on your site to capture that traffic and optimizing the backend data on your site so that titles, descriptions, urls, meta-data, etc. are all working together to get you found.
Anyone promising overnight success you should be weary of. Although, at Creative Noggin we will often utlizing a temporary pay-per-click strategy just to ramp up your traffic while we are optimizing the site so that we can capture organic traffic. This does take a little bit of time so it's nice to have both of those working together.
So check out www.alexa.com and see where you stand! Who knows. Maybe you're giving Google a run for their money!
