It pays to be patient.

Muscular and determined, swift-legged skaters speed around the track at the Olympics being held now, but most of their hard work came in the months and years before this big event. It’s the same way with getting a high ranking in the search engines.

As a business person, you are up against a lot of competition. What can you do? There are two basic ways to get a high ranking in the “natural” search results (as opposed to pay-per-click listings) in Google, Yahoo, and Bing search engines.

1. Post Many Pages

Google, which has around 70% of the search market, is like a hungry bear in the springtime. It looks for the best fish in the stream, and those are the ones that are swimming the fastest. In the same way, the websites that are producing pages using keywords that are relevant to, let’s say a bicycle shop, such as “bikes,” “parts,” “seats,” “cross-country,” or whatever, will get a high ranking.

Therefore, post many many pages describing your business service or product, on a regular basis. A great way for most businesses to do this is to build your website with a program called WordPress, which allows for the easy posting of many pages in a blog format. WordPress also allows you to change your web pages from any computer, with the use of a password.

2. Get Incoming Links

The other way to raise your rank is to have many incoming links from other websites to yours. These other websites should be relevant to yours, and you will fare better if they themselves are popular websites. Thus, a bicycle shop that has an incoming link from the League of American Bicyclists, which itself has a high ranking, would be very good. If you have good contacts among your associates, make use of them and ask them for a link to your site.

Another way to get incoming traffic is to post press releases on any of the free press release sites. The best is probably www.PRLog.com. While search engines won’t use these to boost your rank, the press release websites themselves have higher rankings than your website, and readers will find out about you through the articles.

Search Engine Optimization Takes Time

All in all, it takes time to build up your ranking in the search engines. It’s called Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and such services will tell you that it takes at the minimum three months to see any bump in incoming visits, six months to see more, and a full year before the method really kicks in. You can track the number of web visits, and where they come from, with the use of Google Analytics, which is free.

It is probably true that the businesses and non-profits that would benefit most from SEO are those that need a high number of clients or customers, and have much turnover traffic, rather than those who rely on a low number.

WomanCare Services in the Chicago area has seen its web visits increase from nine per day to more than 35 per day in a two-year period. (See graph above.) This success is due to our SearchRank program, of TreeFrogClick, Inc. in the Chicago area. For more information, call Kevin Banet at 708-393-4098.