Everybody’s read the book, “Why Johnny Can’t Read” right? Well, I figured it was about time to write the article, “Why Johnny Can’t Get His Site Ranked” because there are a lot of people out there who are throwing spit balls at Godzilla and they’re not going to make a dent in him. They might tick him off a little and have him breathing fire down your backside, but you certainly won’t slay the big beast. This article explains why.

Probably the biggest mistake people make when they try to get their site ranked is they fail to check out the competition. Just because a site is number one on the Google hit parade doesn’t mean that it’s a great site. Some keywords are so non competitive that sites with PR rankings of zero and a half dozen backlinks can take the number one spot. Knocking them off is a piece of cake. But what happens when you’re targeting keywords where the top site has a PR 7 and 10,000 backlinks? I’d say you were in for a heck of a fight. So that’s the first mistake people make…they don’t properly size up the competition and come up with a strategy to beat that competition.

After that, it’s all the little things…and trust me…there are TONS of them. Poor Johnny doesn’t even have enough sense to fill in his TITLE and DESCRIPTION tags for his page. A lot of people don’t think these are a big deal, but they are. Sure, Google isn’t going to display your description exactly as it is (since they look for other relevant phrases on each page) but without it, you’re shooting totally in the dark.

And then there are all those links to other pages on your site. URLs that are a gazillion characters long aren’t the best way to direct a visitor from one page to the next. And “click here” is a disaster waiting to happen unless you’re trying to rank for Adobe Reader. How about using some anchor text that clearly tells the visitor what they’re going to find on that other page?

And organization…don’t even get me started on that. The more pages your site has, the more organized they need to be. You don’t want people have to comb every inch of every page looking for what they want. If you have a site on all different kinds of flowers, how about having a main index on your home page with links going to pages where, on each one, you discuss ONE flower. That way, if people are interested in roses, it’s one click on the main page to reach their destination. How hard is that?

As for off page SEO, don’t even go there. Johnny doesn’t have a clue how to get backlinks. Well how about starting with something simple like visiting other sites (preferably blogs) in his niche and posting relevant comments about the topic. He might actually get some additional visitors besides the backlinks.

Yeah, all of this and a lot more could really help Johnny rank with the search engines.

But maybe Johnny has to learn to read first.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

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