Ok so you’ve had your website built, it looks great, you spent ages working on the content so that all the necessary information is included but… it’s not getting any traffic and you can’t find it in the search engines.

If you want Google or any of the other main search engines to rank your site highly in the coveted first few pages where most searchers remain then you need to spend some time thinking about search engine optimization (SEO).

There are a number of factors that you need to consider but the two key points that will make or break the success of your website in the search engines are:

1. The content it contains
2. The number of backlinks pointing to the site

It makes perfect sense that if you want to be found in the search engines for the phrase “yellow gold hubcaps” then your website needs to have content on it about “yellow gold hubcabs”. You can’t expect to rank highly for a phrase that you have no content on your site about. After all, Google wants to provide valuable search results to their users so that they remain users and Google retains the market share of search traffic. They’re not going to do that if they provide irrelevant results.

The second item may not be quite so obvious to new website owners. Basically a backlink is a hyperlink from another website back to your website. Google considers this a “vote” for your website and if the link comes from a quality, related site then it’s considered a very important “vote” and gives your site more credibility. The more credibility your site has, the higher up the search engine rankings it should appear.

Now the more competitive the keyword you’re hoping to rank highly for, the more backlinks you’re going to need. You can check how many backlinks your competition has by doing a Google search in the format:

link:[domainurl]

replacing [domainurl] with the url of the website you wish to check. For instance: I’ve just searched in Google for “dog clothes” the number 1 ranked site is www.glamourdog.com. If I now search in Google for link:www.glamourdog.com I can see that there are 74 links pointing to the site that Google recognizes. You will find that yahoo will find many, many more links pointing to the site but Google is far more choosy about what it considers a valid link and in most cases it’s Google we’re trying to impress.

If you’re hoping to rank for a very competitive niche then you may find the top sites have thousands of links so it’s important that you think about how you’re going to gain backlinks to your own site.