The Real Secret to Great Search Engine Rankings…. Revealed!

It seems to me that nowadays people are more focused on achieving good search engine rankings than ever; businesses in particular.

“Well no shit, Shirlock,” some may say, but I’m serious.  SEO has been established as an extremely feasible and relatively cheap way of getting more and/or new business.  As a result, EVERYONE wants in.

So in the last couple years I have seen businesses of all sizes jump on the bandwagon.  I’ll share a little insight, too: they ALL want to be #1.

Obviously that’s just not possible, so in these past few years I have spent a lot of time getting clients’ sites to rank as high as they possibly can for as many of their key terms as possible.  And in doing so, I have worked with some sites that just have too many barriers to even have a chance in their current state.  I’m sure any  SEO that’s been around for a while has come across those.  But that isn’t what this post is about.

This post is really geared to speak towards those sites that may not have a ton of barriers, and may in fact have a vast majority of SEO best practices implemented, but just aren’t seeing the results they’ve been expecting.   This may actually be more common a case than most people think.  I have had many site owners come to me saying, “why, why, WHY aren’t we ranking well for [X] term??”

The truth is that the answer to their question may not be something they really want to hear.  The truth is that it comes down to a matter of perceived value.  Let me explain.

I’m sure most people reading this have come across at least a few videos of Matt Cutts answering questions from people in the web community.  I think some could/would also say that MOST videos of Matt Cutts answering the “how do I optimize my site for search?” question ends with the same tune.  Well I believe there is a reason for that.

That familiar tune to which I am referring is the age old “just focus on generating good content that people will want to link to” line.  I think you know what I’m talking about.  I, myself, found that to be a bit of a cop out at first.  But then I got to thinking…. Why does he just keep saying that?  Could it be a company line? Sure.  But I like to think that it has more meaning than that.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here are a couple of links:

• http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5179191836301432169 (The whole thing is great, but skip to about 1:35 to just hear what I’m referring to)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRzMhlFZz9I (another great video, but again, what I’m referring to is about 1:00 into it.

In both videos, Matt states that generating good content (that people will want to link to, wink, wink) is one of the single most important parts of doing well in SEO.

So what? That doesn’t really answer the website owner’s question about why they’re not ranking well for a certain term.  Well, actually, it does.  So here is the candid secret to good search engine rankings:

HAVE A GOOD WEBSITE!

Sounds a little silly and even TOO remedial, doesn’t it?  I would agree.  But seriously, think about it.   Why would Matt Cutts keep saying to just focus on your users and having good content?  It comes back to what I said about perceived value and a scope even larger than just SEO.

Truly good websites will tend to do well in the search engines because some portion of the web community deems them as being valuable.

So regardless of your website’s purpose (ecommerce, lead-gen, publication, etc), you need to ask yourself one question: “How can I make my website content more valuable to my users?”  Answer that, and you will already be well on your way to great search engine rankings.

Cheers!