How To Smash Through Googles Glass Ceiling

Last week there was some SEO discussion about a perceived Glass Ceiling effect in Google. The symptoms of which are totally flat traffic from Google over a long period.

We covered breaking through traffic barriers back in 2007 but the focus of that article was a general increase in traffic rather than specifically increasing Google traffic.

We see websites on a regular basis that are flat-lining with no perceivable traffic increase for months or even years and our approach is always the same.

• Step 1: Expand
• Step 2: Promote

Expansion

Most sites which have plateaued can gain additional traffic by creating a lot more content. All things being equal a blog with 10,000 posts will get a lot more traffic than a blog with 1,000 posts.

The simple reason for this is that a web-page normally ranks for 2 or 3 keywords & phrases in its title tag. The more pages you have the more keywords you can potentially rank for.

Methods of expansion include directories, news articles, blog posts and even the simple task of adding more products or services to your inventory.

With a little imagination any website can be expanded to rank for whole new sets of keywords.

Promotion

Adding thousands or hundreds of thousands of new pages to a website isn’t going to help unless the increase in pages is matched by an appropriate increase in TrustRank and PageRank.

In simple terms you need to increase the quality of links you can attract and move your site a few notches up the Trust scale.

Read: TrustRank: How to Get In The Google TrustBox

BY Patrick Altoft AT 1:04pm ON Saturday, 18 October 2008

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3 and has worked in the SEO industry for over 10 years. With experience across some of the worlds largest brands as well as startup businesses Patrick is well known in the industry and speaks regularly at the major SEO conferences and events. Follow Patrick on Twitter or Google+