Business Battlefield: The Internet Land Rush Is On

There is a land grab happening now in the internet world. Much like real estate, your success can depend on location, location, location. Instead of being situated at a busy intersection, today's valuable real estate is in the first 10 spots on Google for a keyword your customer might search. As search engine optimization (SEO) begins to mature, obtaining one of these choice locations is going to get a lot tougher real fast.

Why? Google keeps its search formula under a lock and key the same way Coca Cola safeguards its recipe. What we do know is that Google values sites with high "page rank," the age of a domain and the number of sites linking into the site (like a footnote or citation in a research paper). As time passes, sites already in the top 10 of specific keywords will continue to age. With that age, they continue to strengthen a few of the items that influence the Google algorithm (such as domain age). If the site is properly optimized for SEO, then the easier this process will be. If the domain name matches the keyword, it's even easier. Within the next several years domain names with your keyword will be harder to come by and sites at the top 10 will have been there for quite a while. All of these factors can conspire against you in future rankings. Over the next 5 to 10 years many organizations that currently rank in Google's top 10 for valuable keywords will likely be immovable unless, of course, there is a major change in how Google ranks results.

Why should your business care about ranking in Google? Think about your average customer before they know you and your company exist. How do they research their problem? An increasing amount of them, from simple consumer purchases to complex business needs, research their problem on Google. This could be a great opportunity for your company. If you build out your site properly to showcase what you do and how you do it, you should be able to rank properly for the words and phrases that will be easily found by probable customers searching for answers to their needs but don't know your company exists.

Many companies are happy with the fact that they currently rank #1 in Google when someone searches their company name. That is all well and good when the customer already knows you exist, but business generation through a search engine is most valuable when your company is "discovered" by someone who doesn't know about you yet. As product category and service offering keywords continue to get more crowded online, it is important to grab that prime, top 10 real estate while it is still possible to do so. If you aren't focusing on search engine optimization now, you may well regret it in the future.

Jim Nichols is Vice President – Digital at Stern + Associates, a full-service communications firm that fuses the best of public relations, traditional media, digital, marketing and direct engagement strategies through its  Connected Communications ^SM approach.

Thanks to Blogs Forbes
http://blogs.forbes.com/jimnichols/2011/06/01/business-battlefield-the-internet-land-rush-is-on/?partner=alerts