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When discussing search rankings I sometimes get the feeling that some web site owners don’t really understand what search rankings really are. Understanding search rankings can help you look at your Holistic Online Marketing campaign in a different perspective – and perhaps give you the background to understanding why you need to act on certain issues.

The first issue to clear up concerns what we all refer to as ‘web sites’. Web sites as a whole are not ranked – it is individual pages that get ranked. To be specific, individual pages are ranked according to keywords and how they compare to other pages on the web using the same keywords.

Here is a simple example. If your primary keyword is “virus removal” then you should be targeting that as part of a group of keywords. “Toronto virus removal”, “computer virus removal”, “pc virus removal toronto” are examples of keyword phrases you may be targeting. Your competitors may outrank you in the search engines for the first two keyword phrases whilst you may outrank them for the third.

The reason you outrank them for the third phrase could be as simple as them not optimizing for that phrase. You have done a better job of optimizing that phrase (by engaging the services of a top notch SEO consultant of course). What is interesting is that these three phrases could be optimized on the one page.  So for two search terms, their page outranks yours but you outrank them for the third.

Search engine optimization, as the name suggests, is the art of optimizing for the search engines. We optimize web pages to gain the highest possible place in search results for queries related to that page.  Our job is to try and anticipate the searcher – by doing that we are optimizing for their search terms. The aim, of course, is to appear higher in the search results than your competitors.  So forget about web site rankings as such – SEO is all about individual pages and how they connect to each other all over the web.