Google Ranking

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I changed the title from "Online Strategies" to "Internet Strategies", but has it helped at all? My theory was that this site would be easier to find, if I used more common words. The main problem with that, is that by using common words, you end up in those results with 1 mill hits or more.

At the time I didn't worry much about that, since part of my theory was based on the assumption that my site was better tuned to be indexed than most other sites, and would therefore rank higher than most. That assumption seems to be a quite wrong. It might be better tuned than most, but it hasn't been ranked high at all. I'll get back to that a bit later.

Measuring Tools

To find out how my site is ranked when searching for specific words or sentences, I used a simple online tool called Google Rankings which takes a search term, a URL and a Google API Key. You type in the words you want to be found by and the URL to your site, and it'll tell you your ranking on Google. The only thing you need that you probably don't have, is the Google API Key, but it's easy to get.

There are many other tools out there to measure and track your ranking, one of these is Advanced Web Ranking that not only finds your ranking, but it also stores it for long term analysis and tracking. It works with other search engines as well, but is not free (US $59).

Google's own Sitemap tool tries to tell you on which searches your site ranks highest, but those statistics hasn't been updated for my site the last month or so, so I wouldn't use that as a basis of my rank measuring and tracking.

The Results

Having tried the tools, I discovered something very sad indeed. Of the top 1000 results of searching for "internet strategy" or "internet strategies", I wasn't found at all. I'm not being found on "Online Strategy" or "Online Strategies" either, so I'm obviously doing something wrong.

There are areas where I rank quite high though. I'm ranked at no. 12 on "10 ways to increase" and 48 on "Black Hat SEO Tactics", but that's it. I can't seem to find any more of my posts on Google.

Room for improvements

So, where have I gone wrong?

First of all, my site is very "thin" compared to other internet strategy websites, due to the low number of posts on the subject.

Secondly, the topic might be too wide to attract any visitors, since they won't find anything here that they can't find on other sites.

This leads back to some of my point on attracting visitors: you need valuable and frequently updated content, as well as something unique to offer. Apparently my content isn't unique enough, and it's certainly not updated frequently enough.

Cross roads

At this point, there are two obvious roads to follow: stay on course or choose a different subject. Since my content on internet strategies are no more than 2 months old, it could be argued that I simple haven't got enough content to get a high rank on Google. Furthermore, there are very few people linking to my pages, which means that my content is not considered valuable enough by Google, compared to other sites on the subject. On the other hand, if I changed the subject or focus of the site, I might be able to pick a subject more unique than internet strategies, and thus be more likely to rank higher.

This definitely needs more thought, but you should be able to spot the results shortly.