Top search engine rankings could potentially result in a large amount of exposure and traffic. But now it’s coming to a point where large amounts of exposure and traffic result in high search engine rankings. The search engines (especially Google) get more advanced, they are working hard to improve the quality of their search results and return listings that are sure to be useful to the searcher. In other words, branded and well-known sites that already receive a lot of traffic are promoted to the top of Google search.
You can see this happening in Google already…
- Wikipedia and other big informational sites rank #1 for countless general queries
- Google recently gave a boost to big brands in its search results
- Google is making an effort to clean up its results – getting rid of thin affiliate pages, discounting obvious paid links, manually editing rankings, etc. There is bound to be some collateral damage – especially for small sites
With the web becoming more mature every day, more links and optimization are required to get ahead of the competition for keyword phrases across the board. Not only that, but it’s not even just about links anymore. As Google adds new capabilities and data points through its vast network of services, the search engine will look at a variety of additional signals of quality (e.g. traffic, user engagement, social factors) and use them to influence its rankings.
It’s much harder now to “fake” authority with a small site and work your way up Google’s search rankings. You can’t just start a new site and get links to move up in the rankings and build traffic. Those days are over. Soon enough you’ll need traffic and exposure, the very things that you’re looking to get, in order to rank at all.
If you’re a small publisher, how do you get that traffic without first being included in the rankings? Sure you can buy some traffic, engage in social media, and employ guerilla marketing techniques, but it will all be much more difficult and expensive 5 years down the line. There’s still time for you to build up your sites and use SEO tactics like on-page optimization and link building to greatly improve your search rankings. However, the key is to build your brand in the process and prove to everyone (including Google) that you have a site that deserves its high rankings. Once the shift occurs, you’ll have the audience and numbers to back you up.
In the near future, you’ll need traffic already in place to rank in the search engines, so you might as well utilize the search engines to build your traffic and exposure while you still can.
