So far, everything has gone so well:

• a brilliant idea came after a long brainstorming session
• the right domain for the project happened to be available or cheap
• web designers, copywriters and programmers worked long night shifts and under high pressure to build a representative website

…and now: Nothing happens.

Visitors just happen to stray onto the site, but the hoped-for rush doesn’t materialise. If this continues, the shop will soon be closed again - after all, the operating costs continue unabated.

What is missing is simply traffic - and in Germany, Austria and Switzerland this essentially means that the website has to attract visitors from the search engine, which has an overwhelming market share of around 90 per cent: Google.

The search engine ranking must be improved in order to bring the website closer to the top of the search results. Nobody outside the search engine giant’s development labs knows exactly how to achieve this, but observations and patent research provide a fairly useful picture of the ranking factors that influence PageRank and other criteria for a good search engine ranking.

Experts in SEO methods agree that there are between one hundred and two hundred individual ways to achieve improvements.

This also means that starting to optimise your web presence without knowing the initial state of these factors is like flying blind, where you are pretty sure where you want to end up but have no idea of the location of the runway.

As there are so many factors that are important for a good Google ranking, manually collating the current status is tedious and time-consuming. The help of a PageRank-Checker, i.e. a software tool for automatically determining the most important key figures about the suitability of the homepage for a good ranking, makes this work easier.

Once this point has been ticked off, the next step is to improve the obvious shortcomings.

The first work package usually consists of a combination of detailed improvements on the website itself (on-site optimisation) and the acquisition of links on other domains. The acquisition of backlinks is a discipline in itself, and the methods used are varied: from simple favours from friends, acquaintances or partners to rented and purchased links to parasitic so-called black-hat methods that specifically exploit gaps in the search engine algorithms or security vulnerabilities on third-party websites.

In this phase, it is important not to believe in patent remedies for quick success, but to work on positioning with a sense of proportion and sustainability.

Observing generally recognised principles and webmaster rules leads to a better ranking in the search engines in the long term and reliably.