How do you kill a snakehead fish

Well if you are like me, you just had to find out more – After all who ever heard of a snakehead fish. Well it would seem that for the month of February, “How do you kill a snakehead fish” is the 8th highest relative increase in search engine enquiries for the 4 week period to 23rd February 2008. Who cares? Maybe not you or but do not let this diminish the significance of the enquiry. There are some 15,300 (soon to increase to 15,302) entries in Google’s search engine index that reference this very subject and from what I have seen these fish make a piranha look like a goldfish !

Anyhow the point of this article is not about killing a snakehead fish. I will leave that to other better qualified. The point I am wishing to illustrate is the importance of examining what is popular in search engines. Marketing yourself on the internet is not about what you think is popular it is all about reading where the market is itself.

Last week I attended an internet marketing workshop for 2 days and heard stories form from rather wealthy marketers who told the story of how they developed the products they sold. Quite simply the checked out Google and the other leading search engines to see what was attracting interest on the search engines then went out and found the product to match the market interest. I suppose its fairly straightforward – it is easier to sell to a market that is looking for what you have to offer rather than convincing that market it wants what you have.

There is another interesting lesson to be learnt here. Gaining higher rankings on the search engines is all about improving the ranking of your own pages. You do this through a number of initiatives of which the following are important:

• Having lots of links to your site from relevant websites
• Having lots of traffic to your site
• Having content to what is of current interest

Now how good is it if you write an article that is optimised on a currently “hot topic”? Firstly it will increase your traffic through the article which in itself improves the ranking of the site containing the article. If that site then points to your own domain then that in itself improves the ranking of your own site because a link in to your site is improving its own ranking. Now by itself it will probably make little difference but with a number of similarly written articles included on your site or in your blog you can do wonders for your own site rankings in the search engines.

You thought this article was all about how to kill a snakehead fish didn’t you? Well as you see I have said nothing about that but I do hope that you have learnt some other useful lessons in how to improve the search engine ranking for your website by building powerful back links.

Oh yeah – if you want to see the list click here