High Google Rankings: Frequency vs. Positioning

By Ulli G. Niemann
Posted Friday, July 23, 2004

There's an assumption that the higher a ranking or positioning you have with major search engines; the more people will beat a path to your web doorstep. But based on my experience, that's simply not true! There's another factor that is just as important and may actually drive more traffic to your site.

This big secret is frequency: The number of times your name appears when someone enters a key word in a search engine. I believe that the more times you appear in a search, the greater the likelihood of someone actually clicking through to your site.

How do you get frequent listings in search engines? Write quality content articles.

I’m an investment advisor and a while ago I started a second web site (www.successful-investment.com) to promote my weekly mutual fund newsletter, capture potential prospect names and house a library of my published articles.

To get people to the site, I naturally wanted to move up in the search engine food chain. I did the usual meta tag things, but that didn't cause my rise in the rankings. What did cause it surprised me.

One of my first articles (“Do lifestyle funds provide greater security?”) was submitted to some 30 article banks and web sites. Many of them reprinted it, which increased the number of appearances of my name associated with the topic. Since many of these sites were already ranked high on the search engines, I rode on their success.

Searching Google for "Lifestyle funds" produces over 3 million results. On the first page of results my article is listed four times, on the second page three times and on page three it's listed three times, and so on. If you were searching this term, with that much presence you would not likely overlook me.

In addition to generating hits on my web site from potential clients, my frequent listing in search engines yielded another benefit: I was invited to CNNfn's Hollywood studio to discuss my article “How to evaluate load vs. no load mutual funds.” They found me by searching Google for "load vs. no load." That produced almost 5 million results and on the first page my article appears three times, on the second three times and on the third three time as well—and some included my company listing. I was an authority!

In the past six months I have written and published 17 articles with the key search terms being part of the title. I pretty much get similar results with all of them. Why? I believe quality content is a key.

My core business is "personal investment management." If you search that on Google you will get about 11 million results. I currently rank number 8. And that's among the ‘who’s who’ in investment management, companies that invest big bucks to manipulate getting high rankings on search engines.

Can I improve on that? Probably not by trying to manipulate positioning, but definitely with frequency. And that comes from writing articles.

Now, maybe you like this idea but think you can't write quality articles. I'm not a writer, but my articles get picked up by e-zines and article banks all the time. How does that happen? It's actually simpler than you think.

There are two aspects to writing; 1. the actual content and 2. the writing style. If you’ve been in business for any length of time you have a wealth of information that you take for granted but others would love to know about. You should be able to write a 300 to 800 word article about your product or service area. Don’t worry about the style; just write quality content that will be helpful to your potential customers.

Although my writing skills are pretty sharp because I do a lot of writing, I would not consider them to be on the same level as a professional writer. So I have a second secret to success.

One of my clients is an award winning Hollywood writer and he “enhances” my articles. It’s usually not a lot of work, but at times I need a better transition from point A to point B. Since the content is clear and basically organized, he doesn't have to spend any time researching or "doing the heavy lifting." He can devote his attention to enhancing the quality of the presentation, and that doesn't take long or cost much.

[If you need help with writing you may contact Laren Bright (punster@earthlink.net) and tell him I sent you.]

I think you will find that writing articles becomes a lot easier once you have that kind of assistance. It certainly became stress-free for me when I didn't have to worry about form and could concentrate on my long suit: content.

It’s hard to beat the results that my articles have produced for me in terms of exposure, Google rankings and new clients. Given these facts I propose that frequency beats positioning anytime. Try it and see if it boosts your rankings and your business.

About The Author

Ulli Niemann is an investment advisor and has written about methodical approaches to investing for over 10 years. He is stepping out of his comfort zone to write about different areas in which he has gained experience that can assist others. You can reach him at: (www.successful-investment.com)
ulli@successful-investment.com