How to Increase Traffic to Your Website

Optimize Your Google Appeal to Grow Your Business

Google has become a household name over the last five years and was recently ranked as having the number one brand name in the world. It’s very important for anyone operating a web site, doing on-line advertising or simply being in business to understand its services and how best to use them. More than 60% of all searches done on the Internet use Google.

There are several ways that Google’s services can help potential buyers find your business. Your web site, like every public one on the Internet, is regularly scanned by their automatic spider programs that examine the content and links on every page. The Google index holds more than 10 billion Internet pages and the firm regularly updates its indexes, a task that is executed by the estimated 450,000 servers in their 6 data centers.

When a user submits a search, Google presents a list of matches selected and ordered based on a number of factors. These are referred to as the Organic Search results or non-paid results, and appear in the main body of the results page. Above and to the right of these will be the paid ads from Google’s AdWords program.

The factors for organic search results include the relevancy of the content on a web page to the searched terms, and something called the Google PageRank for that page.  There are probably other criteria used too, but Google keeps the algorithms they use secret. 

The PageRank is a number between 0 and 10 that is calculated as part of the indexing process. Every page the spider finds will have a PageRank calculated. It starts out at zero and grows as that page is linked to by other pages, whether within its host or from external web sites. Over time, the PageRank score will grow as a page is linked to more often. The underlying philosophy of the Google system is that pages are ranked, not by how often they are accessed, but by their relevancy and by the number of other pages that link to them. Google describes it as follows: “PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves important weigh more heavily and help to make other pages important”.

So more traffic to your website doesn’t increase your PageRank, but a higher PageRank will mean more traffic.

So where does your website sit in the Google world?

To check on the PageRank of your website, use the Google Toolbar in your browser. Just search for it if you don’t have it installed already. Business websites, with some history typically, have PageRanks in the range of 4 to 7. High popularity sites score higher: New York Times scores an 8, CNN a 9 and Google itself a perfect 10.

How can we increase the number of visitors to our web site?

There’s a whole industry developing around this topic, referred to as Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, and it’s certainly worth engaging an expert to get advice. But are some low-cost things that we here at All Covered have done to increase our non-paid web traffic

• We redesigned our website to make it more focused on the types of business issues that people are searching on. We significantly increased the number of pages and we regularly update content.
• We added local sections for each city that we operate in that allow us to have content featuring information on each local market operation, customer stories, community activities, upcoming events and so on. Google will favor these pages for searches that include the city name.
• We have placed articles that include in-bound links to our pages into different external web sites, with links back to our pages.

The net result has been a 300% increase in non-paid visitors.

If you have questions about this, send them to marketing@allcovered.com

How All Covered Can Help

If this is an issue for your business, All Covered provides backup consulting and services for small businesses nationwide.

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