Is your website's focus global or local?

There is a huge difference in time and effort needed to climb to the top of the search results, and it all depends on the keyword phrases you want your visitors to find you by. Attaining top ranking on the search engines depends on the competitiveness of the keyword terms you are targeting. Meaning, the fewer web pages competing for the same terms the higher your chances are of succeeding.

Let's say you are the webmaster of a small local real estate firm in Ajax, Ontario Canada with a population of about 80,000. Your job would be fairly simple and straightforward to get a top ranking for "ajax real estate" or "homes in ajax. In this case, the webmaster could probably get a top ranking just by creating unique title tags for the website with the keywords in the title tag and "sprinkle" the same keywords in the body text. Ajax Ontario Real Estate Agent : Ajax Home Realtors

On the other hand if you wanted to rank in New York or Los Angeles for real estate related terms, your chances of succeeding would be severely tested. You may already know the reason why. That's right, a bigger population means more real estate offices with websites that have the same keyword terms somewhere on their web pages. The end results is a bigger optimization and link building effort, and most likely more time needed to get the same results as our friendly Ajax realtors. Since there are many more sites competing for the New York and Los Angeles real estate terms, naturally the New York or Los Angeles based real estate webmasters would have to go beyond title tag optimization. They would have to do some serious content writing, optimization, and link building to get a number one ranking.

However, this should not discourage you because the search engines rankings are not written in stone, and even the number one website can be unseated with persistent effort and patience.


Website owners who sell products or distribute their content worldwide are in a tougher situation when it comes to SEO. It's easy to see why. Once we remove the local geographical terms and do a search for "real estate" only, we are presented with over 370 million results from Google: Results 1 10 of about 370,000,000 for real estate. Unless the keyword phrase is fairly unique, competing globally for popular keywords terms will take more time and careful link building. In some cases, it can take as much as one year of search engine optimization to achieve a top 10 ranking for a very popular term.