Google is a beast that a lot of people never learn to tame… but having spent several years getting top spots for various clients, I’ve found a distinct pattern in how the best sites rise to the top. And the good news is that if you understand this pattern, you should be able to rank high for your site too. Here are the 5 steps any webmaster can take to rank their site well:
1) Post individual pages of targeted content – If you look at all the top-ranked sites (Wikipedia.com, for example), they all have one thing in common… they all have many pages of specific content. Google bases its results on relevancy and many webmasters make the mistake of trying to optimize a single page website for many different keyword phrases. This will do nothing but harm you – you need to create as many individual pages of targeted content as possible to get the highest ranks.
2) Create “internal” links between your own pages – One of the best ways to rank high for your site is to make sure that Google can find every page on your site. You need to interconnect as many pages of your own website as possible so that Google will search your entire site. This is a mistake many people make and it’s one that can easily improve your site’s ranking with relatively little work.
3) Submit articles to get links from other sites – Submitting articles to article directories is a great way to rank higher. Not only do you get a strong backlink from a site like EzineArticles.com, but you also get other blogs and websites republishing your content with the link intact. Another nice benefit of this is that some articles can make it to the first page of Google on their own, driving huge amounts of traffic to your site with relatively little work on your part.
4) Create a blog – Creating a blog is a great way to boost your search engine submits for several reasons. The most important factor is that if you post regular updates to a blog, those updates are often indexed by Google and can sometimes lead to good traffic. Blogs also have “RSS” (Real Simple Syndication) feeds that allow other sites to post their content and a “back” link. All of this works to increase the search engine presence of your site and will also grow your brand. Blogs can be very beneficial and are easy to start; just search for “WordPress” in Google.
5) Get high-quality links – Getting links is the main way Google determines where to rank your site. There are many ways to get links, but the best and most effective way to get them is to acquire what are known as “high quality links”. These are links from high PR (pagerank) sites that are a bit harder to get than normal. If Google sees that your site gets a lot of high-quality, PR-friendly one-way links, it will get you to the top of the rankings quickly and easily. To get the best links, you should approach established sites in your market or you can use a service that has a large number of sites providing these types of links. If you can get one of these services, you will be able to create as many high-quality links to your site as you want and rank higher. Getting high-quality links is actually one of the most effective ways to rank high in Google and is what many of the top search marketers focus on when they get their first ranks.