SEO Reminder: The Front Page Of Google Is The Hardest To Climb

Photo by nickyfern

I previously wrote about using Google Webmaster Tools to increase search engine ranking. The idea is to find the pages that have made it to page 1 of the search results but not quite hit the top spot, and give them a little push to make it there.

This method has its merits, but what was missed is that the higher up the SERPS (search engine results pages) your page reaches the harder it is to climb further. Just like a real mountain.

For example, imagine you publish a blog post with some keywords in the title. It gets indexed quickly because you’ve been blogging consistently for a while and google trusts your domain. It appears in the SERPS on page 25. The page then receives a single link from another blogger and jumps up to page 5. You then start promoting the post and even link back to it yourself in another post and with these few (lets say 5) more links the post has reached the bottom of page 1 of the SERPS.

If it took 1 link to move 20 pages, and then 5 to move up 5, how many will it take to move up 1 more?

A lot.

Naturally it depends on the keyword phrase you are aiming for, but if you plotted this on a graph it would be a curve. I.e. You need a greater number of links to move up a smaller number of places the higher you go.

How To Remedy The Situation

It is likely to be harder to move up to the top of page 1 than to get on page 1 in the first place. The way to avoid getting in this situation is to plan ahead for the keywords you are aiming for and if the first few results are ones that you will never beat, such as government/important Wikipedia pages then aim for slightly different keywords.

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