ranking #1 on google

How significant is ranking on googles top page? its one of the most important things your company can get. when you look at how the move from number 10 on the first page to number 1 on the first page you realize how important the investment in search engine optimization really is. goingfrom number 10 on the first page to number one will increase your traffic on that word as much as 1400%.

If you are the number 10 person for a keyword and you get 15 clicks in a month for that term you can expec 210 visits per month if you can get to the top spot. And every number in bewteen you number 1 has the potential to double your traffic for that term. Do this for lots of search terms and your whole business will grow exponentially.

Valuable Web Resource

one of the best sites for tracking your website against others is using alexa.com. alexa is a data mining company that tracks the traffic on the top 25 million internet sites. While there information is not completely accurate but then again it is nearly impossible to track all the traffic on a website unless you have code setup on the site which independant companies dont have. You can see on Alexa how many backlinks lead to your site and also which websites have those backlinks to your site. you can see a full list of your top competitors backlinks as well. If your competitor has high google rankings then it might make sense to go after the same backlinks that they have. If a site will backlink to your competitor there is a good chance they will backlink to you.

Compete.com is another top company in this business.

Bad Neighbor Link Exchange

It was brought to my attention that exchanging links with just any website on the internet is not a very good idea. Google and the other search engines not online look at the number of back links you get to your site but they also look at the quality of those links. The more relevant they are to your site the more valuable they are to google. But there is whats called the bad neighbor that can really hurt you in googles eyes. This is basicly when you link to another site their list of links effects your quality score in googles search engine. if they are buying links or using blackhat tricks your rankings can be hurt by this. so while backlinking thru link exchange looked like it was going to be an effective avenue for increasing our traffic. Thankfully my SEO consultants talked me out of it. Now I just have to go back and clean up the hodgepodge of bad link exchanges my company has entered into over the last 8 years. P.S. Links that lead to pages that nolonger exist is not a good thing either. keep track of your outbound links.