A 2005 study of search engines confirms that you must be in one of Google’s top three spots for your niche.

These studies use a computerized tracking device to see where the average person looks when he or she glances at a webpage.

Here’s how often people actually looked at each search engine listing on one page. Remember, this is how often they looked… not whether they clicked on that link or not.

Rank 1 - 100%
Rank 2 - 100%
Rank 3 - 100%
Rank 4 - 85%
Rank 5 - 60%
Rank 6 - 50%
Rank 7 - 50%
Rank 8 - 30%
Rank 9 - 30%
Rank 10 - 20%

In other words, if your website is one of the top three on a particular search engine page, everyone who looks at that page will see your listing. If you’re in the fourth spot or lower, they may nor may not notice that you’re listed at all.

So, it’s important to find your niche and use that to focus your keywords. Use those same keywords in your content, so that your website is in one of those top three spots.

Keywords in your META tags, in your webpage Title, and in your content are what make a difference. Don’t overuse them, of course, but make sure that you repeat the important two or three words, once every 100 words or so.

Likewise, keep your webpages focused on those keywords. Links from your site to others’ should be related to those keywords, too. Keep your site cohesive and on a single theme, when you’re starting out.

See, there are programs that advertise that they’ll “drive thousands of visitors to your pages.” (TrafficHurricane.com is one. I tried it. It’s not only worthless, in my opinion, but it can land you on the “spammers” list at Google.)

What these programs do is to research keywords related to your website theme, and create thousands (I’m NOT kidding) of webpages that are nothing but links to sites that feature those keywords.

When you use a search engine and land at pages of links, that site probably used one of these programs. Annoying, isn’t it!

Short-term, they can move to the top of the Google lists. Long-term, Google (and others) are putting more attention on text v. links. Links pages like those won’t appear at search engines, and may even be banned… along with the people who own them.

So, while I talk about keywords right now–and they are important–it’s what you actually write about that will serve you well at the search engines, long term.