WHY IT’S IMPORTANT TO BE FIRST ON A GOOGLE PAGE

 

WHY IT’S IMPORTANT TO BE FIRST ON A GOOGLE PAGE

Most people want to rank first on any coveted list. In contemporary society, that list can easily pertain to gaining top spot on Google-the king of the search engine domain. Google leads the international cyberspace world so much so that the Oxford English Dictionary officially added ‘google’ in June 2006; Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary followed suit in its eleventh edition. Despite the fact that hundreds of other search engines are in motion, including Yahoo and MSN, Google earns the most attention by both its users and advertisers.

The unprecedented success of Google shows no sign of slowing down. A measly five years after going public, it achieved a market value of $140-billion. The only other technology companies ahead in market value are Cisco Systems and Microsoft.

As many as three billion searches per month are taken place, which should come as no surprise considering a wide variety of special features it offers from: synonyms, weather forecasts, time zones, stock quotes, maps, earthquake data, movie show times, airports, home listings, free email services, and sports scores. Users can also access particular features for numbers, prices, temperatures, money/unit conversions, calculations, package tracking, patents, area codes, and language translation.

Ranking top spot on google’s search engine is crucial to the budding entrepreneur or creative mind who wants to diffuse a message simply because people don’t have the time or the attention span to look at results beyond the first page of web finding.

In April 2008, Jupiter Research performed a study informing that the number of users who only viewed the first three or four results, let alone the first page of a search, increased between 2002 and 2008. This analysis showed that in 2008, 45% of web surfers viewed the first few results compared to 30% in 2002.

Since its birth, the evolution of the net has changed quickly and Google has played a significant role. Google tapped into these changes when it saw that people don’t just look at sites for text to obtain information anymore when it purchased the popular video-sharing website YouTube in 2006 for $1.6 billion. People now use the net as an interactive tool watching videos, getting directions and purchasing products that just weren’t possible a mere ten years before.

Daily users are not the only sector of people who benefit from Google. Advertisers also see it as a goldmine. In the state of New York alone, there are an estimated 114,400 companies who take advantage of Google’s advertising programs. The business of the advertising model has therefore changed in response. Advertisers are investing more dollars toward websites and less on traditional channels such as television, newspapers and magazines.

For the most part, Google’s advertising model has remained the same. Before Google implemented its advertising format, other search engines applied its ads by way of obtrusive pop-ups and flashes. It may have gotten the attention of the user at one point but it didn’t achieve any substantial worth. Google revamped this format by simplifying the advertising structure making advertisements coherent to what people were searching for. This simplified method in charging advertisers only when users click on links added to the appeal and has become a driving force assisting businesses know and get in touch with who its customers are, thereby generating an increase of revenue.

If you have the desire to create your own website whether it is for profitable or personal reasons, one has to ask: how can I become first on google’s list? Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, helps you to do just that. A range of criteria, or optimization techniques to research before launching your website should be considered. They include: the quality of sites that are linked to your website is by far the most essential factor to take into account; the domain name of your website; the amount of back links that your site hosts; choose a host wisely as it will affect the uptime of your site; If search engines appear and your site is not up that can terminate the lifespan of your website before you even have a chance for success; the site’s title and content should appropriately tie in with your theme; the structural design of your website should be effective; make sure that it’s up-to-speed when functioning; content titles including H1, H2 and H3 in your tags are crucial; key words should always appear in your titles, pages and posts; the names of pages and posts; the amount of content and key words; and the speed of your page.