Sunday, April 15, 2012

Signs On The Internet And Getting Found On Page One Of Search Engines by Terry Minion


For almost 5 years, we've been working on getting our clients on page one of Google, Bing, Yahoo Search, and others. Everyone without exception seems to want that. Page 2 is not acceptable. We get it, yet there is a strange obsession with it at the same time.

Our company is Upward Trend Management Services, LLC. We go by Upward Trend because it is so much shorter and people remember us this way. We want to get all of our clients on a constant upward trend in getting noticed, getting attention, and getting more business. We do this organically without magic, smoke and mirrors, or paying for search hits.

We do it with content, which is organic, in the form of a website, blog, social media, e-newsletter, and video on YouTube. We do use a small number of meta tag keywords on the website, and we also do a small amount of search engine optimization, or SEO. such as Google Maps, Google Places, and some other Internet directories.

Sometimes people have unreasonable expectations of getting to page one of Google, and then they even expect to have several positions on that page too. If this were possible right out of the gate, we would be billionaires laying on the beach being served by a full staff. Yet, many people seem to think that just by having a website they will be immediately and forever on page one of Google. It would be the rarest of rare for this to happen that quickly, and it would have to be something so unique that there isn't anything else like it on the Internet.

The more unique your business or idea is, the easier it is to be on page one. I'll give you an example. I've had fun since I was a teenager with a name I made up, and that name is Delbert Farquart (far*kwart). So, when I signed up for eBay back in 2001, I used Delbert_Farquart as my screen name. Well, it is unique. Later, I also found someone in an Internet search with that name. I could hardly believe it, but it is true. Nonetheless, if you go to Google and type in 'Delbert Farquart,' I will be on page one. Unique is easy as pie.

Common is among the hardest to achieve the same result. The reason is that there are so many. If you do a search for, let's say, auto parts, and even if you put the name of the city and state you want searched, you will see the results are staggering. I just did this for Sacramento CA and it came up with 2,410,000 hits. Just as a comparison, Delbert Farquart had 30,200, and hardly any of those are actually farquart, but portions of that name.

Our name is unique if you use the whole name, but the searches don't work with the whole name unless you put quotation marks on either side of the name. Who does that? Upward Trend on the other hand is so common a phrase. Everyone would recognize that as a common phrase, yet we have been able to get on page one of search engines because of the number of signs we put out there, as well as the content. I'll elaborate.
 

Signs on the Internet

The simplest way that we explain the sheer volume of our services all in one package is to say that, when you decide to go into business, you put up a sign. If you want some more business, you put another sign at the end of the street, then one a few blocks away, then by the freeway, and so on. Pretty soon, you have signs all over town and people see them and know who you are even if they've never been in your business. We do this using a website, blog (another independent, yet linked website), social media including facebook, twitter, linkedin, YouTube channel and video and more. Over time we have so many signs for our clients out there on the Internet that have the potential to be found. Each post on facebook is a sign, each post on twitter, and linkedin is a sign, each post on the blog has its own URL (Internet address) and is a separate page on the Internet, the videos all have their own URL as well, and each page on the website has its own URL. The more signs, the better.

This is how we got a very common phrase like Upward Trend to reflect our company on page one. Plus we have links on all of our clients sites, so that is compound signage. Still, it took us about a year and a half, maybe two years to get on page one organically. Some names are even more common than this, and may take longer. For those types, it may serve to also create a budget for adwords on Google so that you can work ahead of the results organically.

See the rest of this article: Signs on the Internet

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