There's an assumption that the higher a ranking or positioning 
you have with major search engines; the more people will beat 
a path to your web doorstep. But based on my experience, that's 
simply not true! There's another factor that is just as 
important and may actually drive more traffic to your site. 

This big secret is frequency: The number of times your name 
appears when someone enters a key word in a search engine. I 
believe that the more times you appear in a search, the greater 
the likelihood of someone actually clicking through to your 
site. 

How do you get frequent listings in search engines? Write 
quality content articles.

I'm an investment advisor and a while ago I started a second 
web site (www.successful-investment.com) to promote my weekly 
mutual fund newsletter, capture potential prospect names and 
house a library of my published articles.

To get people to the site, I naturally wanted to move up in the 
search engine food chain. I did the usual meta tag things, but 
that didn't cause my rise in the rankings. What did cause it 
surprised me. 

One of my first articles ("Do lifestyle funds provide greater 
security?") was submitted to some 30 article banks and web 
sites. Many of them reprinted it, which increased the number of 
appearances of my name associated with the topic. Since many of 
these sites were already ranked high on the search engines, I 
rode on their success.

Searching Google for "Lifestyle funds" produces over 3 million 
results. On the first page of results my article is listed four 
times, on the second page three times and on page three it's 
listed three times, and so on. If you were searching this term, 
with that much presence you would not likely overlook me.

In addition to generating hits on my web site from potential 
clients, my frequent listing in search engines yielded another 
benefit: I was invited to CNNfn's Hollywood studio to discuss 
my article "How to evaluate load vs. no load mutual funds." 
They found me by searching Google for "load vs. no load." That 
produced almost 5 million results and on the first page my 
article appears three times, on the second three times and on 
the third three time as well-and some included my company 
listing. I was an authority!

In the past six months I have written and published 17 articles 
with the key search terms being part of the title. I pretty much 
get similar results with all of them. Why? I believe quality 
content is a key.

My core business is "personal investment management." If you 
search that on Google you will get about 11 million results. 
I currently rank number 8. And that's among the 'who's who' 
in investment management, companies that invest big bucks to 
manipulate getting high rankings on search engines. 

Can I improve on that? Probably not by trying to manipulate 
positioning, but definitely with frequency. And that comes 
from writing articles.

Now, maybe you like this idea but think you can't write quality 
articles. I'm not a writer, but my articles get picked up by 
e-zines and article banks all the time. How does that happen? 
It's actually simpler than you think.

There are two aspects to writing; 1. the actual content and 
2. the writing style. If you've been in business for any 
length of time you have a wealth of information that you take 
for granted but others would love to know about. You should be 
able to write a 300 to 800 word article about your product or 
service area. Don't worry about the style; just write quality 
content that will be helpful to your potential customers.

Although my writing skills are pretty sharp because I do a lot 
of writing, I would not consider them to be on the same level 
as a professional writer. So I have a second secret to success.

One of my clients is an award winning Hollywood writer and he 
"enhances" my articles. It's usually not a lot of work, but at 
times I need a better transition from point A to point B. Since 
the content is clear and basically organized, he doesn't have 
to spend any time researching or "doing the heavy lifting." He 
can devote his attention to enhancing the quality of the 
presentation, and that doesn't take long or cost much.

[If you need help with writing you may contact Laren Bright 
(mailto:punster@earthlink.net) and tell him I sent you.] 

I think you will find that writing articles becomes a lot easier 
once you have that kind of assistance. It certainly became 
stress-free for me when I didn't have to worry about form and 
could concentrate on my long suit: content. 

It's hard to beat the results that my articles have produced for 
me in terms of exposure, Google rankings and new clients. Given 
these facts I propose that frequency beats positioning anytime. 
Try it and see if it boosts your rankings and your business.

© Ulli G. Niemann