Website Demographics - Your Competition Now Ranks in the Billions
In 2005, Google reported they indexed 8,058,044,651 web pages on the Internet. This does not include the millions of pages they did not index. Today, the number of Google-indexed pages is estimated to be closer to 14 billion (January 2012) with thousands of new websites going live every single day.
Royal Pingdom reports that it was 6 years from when the first website appeared in December 1990 before the Internet had 100,000 websites. In 2008, Royal Pingdom estimated there were more than 162 million websites (not web pages).
Bloggers Are Cloggers
Bloggers are also making competition even tougher for traditional website owners. "Wired Magazine" stated that in January 2002 "nine blogs are created every minute and 2.3 content updates are posted every second.
More recently (2008), Technorati claimed to be tracking over 112.8 million blogs, a number that does not include all the 72.82 million Chinese blogs (as counted by The China Internet Network Information Center).
Every Single Website and Blog is Now Your Competition
All websites and blogs on the Internet are your competition even if you are not sharing the same information, selling the same products, or in the same industry. Why? Because websites and blogs are popping up faster than web crawlers can deal with them and there is intense competition to get robots to even visit your website.
To make things tougher, abandoned blogs and websites cluttering up the Internet will come up higher in search engine returns than fresh sites with poor SEO. And spam sites aggressively steal potential site visitors from legitimate businesses.
Many SEO "experts" try to please only Google robots. But Google itself does not play by the rules and was sued in 2008 for giving higher ranking to spam/parked websites than to real websites. It is important to remember that Google is the "biggie" but not the only search engine to please.
To get attention on the Internet, you need to have robot-friendly meta data, content, and site construction. To get people to click through to your website and read it, you need to have people-friendly meta data, quality content, and a user-friendly layout.
The problems begin when "robot-friendly" and "people-friendly" overlap but do not reconcile. That's where an expert in SEO can help.
