How do I get to the top of Google?

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Everyone wants to get to the top of the search engines.

So how do you do it?

What I want to do here is to strip out all the nonsense, myths and hype that is out there so that you can develop a sensible strategy for promoting your website.

First of all, what puts a page at the top of the rankings?

The reality is that all the search engines use their own, top secret, algorithms to rank sites. Their goal is to deliver relevant, accurate, and up-to-date information to their searching public. To achieve this, they are in a constant war against SEO experts who would seek to skew those rankings so as to put their clients at the top.

There are two “strategies” for getting top rankings: so-called “Black Hat” and “White Hat”. White Hat refers to strategies that work with the search engines – it to deliver quality, relevant, accurate, timely information. Black Hat refers to strategies that try to get around that by various ways of cheating. Black Hat techniques can work. but usually only for a short period of time until all the PhD’s at Google figure out what you are doing and find a way to plug that loophole – and ban you while they are at it.

No one knows for certain what ranking factors work, but these are the ones that have been well proven, have survived the test of time, and make intuitive sense, given the goal of the search engines themselves:

1. Quality themed content, and lots of it. This goes beyond just stuffing in your keywords as much as possible. The SE’s are getting better at determining themes by means of “latent semantic indexing”, which basically means using artificial intelligence to work out what the site is about, rather than just what keywords are on it. To achieve this you need to provide your keyword, certainly, and also other words and phrases that are linked to that.
2. Links to your site. In general, the more the merrier. But not all links are created equal. Links on themed sites are worth more than on pages that are not related to your theme, ie links to your fishing site from another fishing site are worth more than if they come from a cooking site. Links from “bad neighborhoods” count for nothing. They don’t penalize you for other people linking to you, but they certainly don’t reward you for links coming from link farms, Free-For-All pages (FFA), and any other sites they consider to be bad. Links from “authority sites” are worth more. Some indication of a site’s value is given by the Google Page Rank – the higher the better. In time, the Page Rank will probably become theme specific – ie your site could have a high PR for one theme, and a low one for another.
3. Old sites – ie that have been around for a long time are worth more than new ones – in general your PR will rise with time, other factors being equal.
4. New sites are also worthy – remember, the SE’s want to deliver hot news, so they will give an initial priority to new sites, and also to new links pointing to sites, as they might indicate that there is some hot, recent, news on that site.
5. Links OUT to authority sites are also worth points. But don’t have too many. While you are not penalized for any bad links coming in, you can be penalized if you link out to bad neighborhoods.
6. The keywords themselves – obviously some keywords are a lot more competitive than others. Aim to get ranked for your most specific keywords first. If you are a local business, then tag on the name of your town or state to the keyword.
7. Unique content. The last thing that search engines want to do is to deliver to the public 20,000 pages that all say the same thing! Duplicate content is quickly recognized and filtered out by the SE’s. Don’t just slap up the same articles that everyone else is using. You need unique content. That applies both to your own site, and also to the pages that are linking to you.

The Myths

1. An SEO expert can guarantee you a top placement in the search engines. Nonsense! Of course he can’t. He doesn’t own the SE, so he can’t control them, so he can’t guarantee any particular result. All he can guarantee is the actions he will take to try to get you there. And even if he could guarantee you a top placement, it would be WAY beyond your budget (whatever it might be)!

1. An SEO expert can get you 100 PR5, 6, 7, or 8 links for $100. In your dreams. A single link on a PR5 page would probably cost you $50 per month. The higher the PR, the more costly. There are, in fact, only six ways to get links on high-PR pages:
   1. Buy them (very expensive – you will pay around $20 per year per link for PR2 links! – on 100 links that is $2,000 per year!)
   2. Talk them into putting a link on their site for free (!).
   3. Get them to enroll in your affiliate program.
   4. Provide them with unique content that they WANT to put on their sites.
   5. Put them on low PR pages and wait for the PR to rise.
   6. Have such a fantastic site that people voluntarily put links up and tell others about you.
2. You can see how many links point to your page by using the link: command in Google or Yahoo. This command is broken and does not produce any meaningful results. To test that go to Google and type in link:myweddingfavors.com -
   you will get 812 results (as of writing this – it may change.). Yet go to Yahoo and do the same thing. You will get about 253 results. However, do a search for “myweddingfavors.com” (in any of the SE’s) and you will see how many pages really are linking to them! This is Brad Fallon’s site. He is a highly respected and successful internet marketer (and founder of StomperNet). His site is highly optimized and very successful. So which result do you think is most accurate?The fact is, the SE’s don’t want you to know how many links you have. Why not? Because it encourages you to cheat! The only person who could care how many inbound links there are, is someone who is trying to do SEO – and the SE’s are at war with SEO.
   However – here is a Google Hack that reveals the real story: type in to your browser the following search phrase, substituting yourdomain name details of course (Note that the first one does NOT include the dot com at the end).
   http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=.yourdomain.+-+www.yourdomain.com

So - no one can guarantee that the links they create will either be indexed at all or, if they are, will show up in that link: command.

The Best Strategy

Slow and steady wins the race. Optimize your site. Make sure you pages are W3C compliant. Remove extra code (such as javascript) and put it into external files. Make sure that all your meta tags, titles, and body content are consistent with your theme.

Now start creating lots of content. The best strategy is weekly, or preferably daily, create articles, post them to your site, and submit them to article directories. Do this day-in, day-out, so that by the end of the year you have dozens, if not hundreds, or content pages on your site, and thousands of links pointing in.

Gradually you will climb in the SE rankings, not just for your prime keywords, but also for all sorts of long-tail keyword phrases that people type into the SE’s. Look in your referrer logs to see the stuff they put in! Or use this incredible tracking tool.

Then, once you are doing all that and once you have some good content on your site, start to submit it to the search engine friendly directories, especially DMOZ. But don’t do it until you have lots of good quality content on your site.

Finally, spend time contacting, individually, the authority sites in your niche – see if you can do a deal with them to get them to put a link to you, or post an article by you, etc. But for the high PR sites you will have to this one at a time, maybe even by phone. It won’t be easy, but if you can achieve it, it will be well worth the effort.

For more detailed, step by step instructions on how to combine your article marketing with social marketing I HIGHLY recommend UAW member Mark Thompson’s guide. It is one of the best resources I have read at ANY price. Go get it here

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