Why Can’t I Be Found In Google?

That’s how it all started, this trek of mine into internet marketing. For years I had played with a website, omagic.com. I knew all the information I put on there, and I got it to a place where it was “good enough.” Achieving such a lofty place as “good enough,” I proceeded to let it coast. From my ill-informed perspective, there was no need to do significant maintenance on my site. I was getting phone calls, and some of them were actually prospective clients.

The internet only seems like magic…

Then in 2010, I realized I was barely getting any calls. Even the auto-dialer sales calls had ceased. So I did what I supposed any person looking for a party magician would do, I searched on Google. In the past, I had been on page 1 to 3, and I had assumed that was good enough. But on this day, I was not on page 1. Nor was I on page 2, or 3 for that matter. There were lots of other magicians on those pages, many of my friends and acquaintances, and several ones of whom I had absolutely no knowledge, and I wasn’t sure they were the “Best Kid’s Party Magician in Dallas.” I kept clicking the Google pages, one by one until I finally rested on page 13. There I was, about midway down the listing, about 125^th. Of course I knew that no one would be so persistent to search that deeply, and I realized I would have to do something. That fateful search was in October of 2010. By December, I had made enough corrections to my site so to make it back on page 1 of Google. The phone rang, life was good.

“By December, I had made enough corrections to my site so to make it back on page 1 of Google. The phone rang, life was good.”

Google has gone through several changes since then. Actually, they go through changes more often than you think. But one thing pretty much remains the same. Google wants to make money. They do this by presenting to their users the BEST results for their search query. To get the best results, Google relies on authoritative content.

Boiled down to the simple elements, a one page thesis on the benefits of hiring a kids party magician, could get a high ranking in Google if it helps them make money, i.e. it provides quality results for someone’s query. The more people reading and referring to that one page, the more it is viewed as authoritative content. So, if you write a page, share the link to that page on social media (facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, etc.) and then other people read and share, it becomes popular and in the eyes of Google, authoritative. Now when someone searches for the “Benefits of hiring a kids party magician”, if you have performed all of the necessary steps, you could have an article that Google ranks number 1. If you can ever get CNN, or ABC or other highly authoritative sites to link to your article, it gets very easy to be number 1. Where are some other authoritative sites? Educational and government sites are very authoritative (.edu, .gov.) Also, in the field of magic, www.magicsam.com, www.magician.org, and our very own www.dallasmagic.org are authoritative sites.