There is no feeling like being a world class ranker. Searching for your chosen key phrases on all the major search engines and seeing your site on top makes you a world class ranker. I’ll aim to show you what you can do to help yourself and your business on the way to being a dominant ranker.
I once had a call from the editor of .net magazine asking me to take a new site to the top of the search engines. He wanted the whole of the .net crew to retire from the proceeds, but as well as undertaking the SEO work he wanted me to write an article for the magazine explaining the process.
Once I caught my breath from my belly ripping laughter, I said I would be happy to dispel many of the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) bunkum and add some clarity to a world full of myth and mystery.
This is what I wrote for the magazine readership:
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Secret Number 1 – There are no Secrets in SEO!
Despite what you may have heard, there are no secrets in SEO. The web is a very open place and if a site is riding high in the search engine listings, then you can, with enough persistence, get to see why it ranks so well. Replicate it and you can join them
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Secret Number 2 – Ranking Costs you Money
Being Number 1 on the search engines won’t make you rich without either spending money or investment via “sweat equity”. A ranking without an effective business model will just deliver targeted traffic and traffic without monetisation is a drain on your wallet. Bandwidth costs you know!
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Secret Number 3 – Google isn’t the only search engine
Yahoo, MSN and even little ol’ Ask are great sources of targeted traffic and that is the key thing when it comes to SEO. You want targeted traffic, people pre qualified by their conscious decision to search for a phrase in their preferred search engine. Do you really care which engine they come from?
So let’s begin the task of taking your site from where it is now, to climbing up the listings. I am going to presume that you already have a site and are happy with its design and layout. I also hope that it isn’t too heavy on any flash, graphics or non textual based content as:
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Secret Number 4 – Content is Queen
Search engines look for words to incorporate in their index. Words are important, VERY important and if you don’t have them in a format that is visible to the search engine then you are reducing your chances of success.
You may have noticed that I said Content is Queen, rather than the often touted phrase that content is King. The reason is simple, in SEO …
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Secret Number 5 – Links Are King
Links, links, links and more links. Links are what makes a search engine find your page and then they combine to rank it higher in the search engine results page (SERP) than any other single criteria.
The little blue text that you click on a page, taking you to a new destination is the single most important aspect in helping your page rise above the competition.
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Secret Number 6 – Rank a Page Not Your Site
The search engines will be looking to show the most relevant page to a searchers’ query. You can utilise this to your benefit by making sure that each page within your site has a clear and concise topic within your niche area of work. Simply take your time and write more content (refer back to secret number 4) that adds value on your topic of business. Every page that you write gives you the chance to rank for more and more searches phrases, because…..
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Secret Number 7 – The Tail is Extremely Long
The long tail is a phenomenon that is spoken about in search to explain how people search. Statistics vary from various studies that have been done over time, but most (over 80%) of searches that are undertaken on search engines are specific, targeted phrases of 3 or more words.
- Approximately 20% of all searches undertaken are 1 or 2 words long. The so called short head
- A short tail phrase may be: “red shoes” whereas a long tail phrase may be “buy red shoes size 7” I am sure you can see the buy signals in the example long tail phrase compared to the short tail phrase.
- The short tail phrases are most competitive and have the largest individual volumes of search queries undertaken for them, but the 80% of all searches that are left, are the route that many businesses do not attempt to drive targeted traffic for, meaning that they are much less competitive yet convert to sales extremely well. This is important because…..
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Secret Number 8 – Keywords are your sites’ foundations.
When I build a site the very first thing I do is lay some keyword foundations. The keywords are the phrases that our potential visitors will search for and we hope to rank high on the search results page for.
There are many online resources that assist in helping find what people actually search for starting from a seed word or idea.
I have detailed many of them in the research section but the single most important technique I use is to gather all of our team into a room, with a large pack of blank postcards. We all start from a word and keep extrapolating words and phrases, writing each new phrase on a card, until the floor is full with topics and titles.
These words and phrases become the structure for your site, with a page for every topic. Laying these foundations and allowing them to grow according to what you, your team and your visitors’ think is the key to successful opportunities to rank.
Use the automated tools I have mentioned below to assist but please remember that although automated tools are brilliant, nothing is better in understanding the minds of people, than people.
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Secret Number 9 – Mine your existing data.
Make sure that you have stats available to analyse the traffic to your web site.
Most hosting packages offer software that allows you to see where your visitors come from, and those that don’t you can easily use third party packages that will record the information. Knowing what real people actually searched for to come to your site can be an eye opener, and using these to expand upon your keyword pool will open up areas for future visitors to find you.
Knowing that you are getting referrals from the search engines gives a nice warm feeling in your belly and confirms that your previous SEO tactics are providing real and tangible visitors.
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Secret Number 10 – TITLE ?
Because you have followed the advice above and found the keywords, extrapolated upon them to build a list as long as your arm, make sure that you get the keyword in the title tag and you name that page with the keyword in the filename.
Don’t worry about any other “on page” SEO, such as keyword density, meta tags, this trick or that trick as it is ALL so 1999 and we are in 2009! Just make sure that your chosen keyword or phrase is contained within the title and URL and then simply make sure your content is on topic. The search engines are now more than intelligent enough to understand the semantic relationships between words and phrases so trying to assist them with certain keyword densities is an amost fruitless effort. Leave them to their algorithms and simply enjoy the rewards their efforts can deliver to you.
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Bonus Secret 11 – Special Offers Work!
Special Offers help give you a reason for building content and give people a reason to link to you. It may be 15% day on Thursday but even better would be the route of Link Bait, the technique of getting others to link to you due to controversial or other means. Remember links are king!
Why not offer 75% off to everyone who is over 75 and can bring proof of 4 living grandparents, with 10% off to everyone else ?
My personal favourite and best functioning tip is to think old school. Get on the phone and ASK for a link from sites that link to your competitors. If they link to your competitors why wouldn’t they also link to you?
And my special offer is that I promise that you can and will have a site with increased traffic by following the 10 secrets above, but this offer lasts for today only and no guarantees can be made for tomorrow. To give yourself the best chance of knowing what is required tomorrow, you need to undertake research in the industry of search.
Time spent researching what is happening in the Search Optimisation area, along with the important details of what works and what doesn’t is essential to ensure that your energies are best placed.
As well as various print publications I suggest you spend some time acquainting yourself with the following online resources.
SEOMoz Community – http://www.seomoz.org
Where Rand leads you should follow. Watch out for his Friday specials!
Web Master World – http://www.webmasterworld.com
The world’s largest general topic search and Webmaster related forum
SEO Book – http://www.seobook.com
The definitive constantly updated book on SEO there is. It’s available as a PDF rather than hard copy but there is no better product out there.
Search Engine Roundtable - http://www.seroundtable.com
Keyword Research:
Simply use the best there is out there and forget the rest - Google’s Search Keyword Tool - http://www.google.com/sktool/
The most important thing to remember is that simply reading and not implementing means there will be no more growth of traffic, simply growth of intellect. I suggest a balance to ensure your greatest chance of success.
Targetted Traffic beyond SEO
Garnering targeted traffic via search engines is the single largest route you will find visitors, but it is not the only way. Just like an offline business much of your business will come from referrals and word of mouth marketing. The major difference is that online you can go and find where your prospective customers hang out rather than waiting for them to come through your front door.
Social Interaction and bookmarking sites, such as Digg (http://www.digg.com) Twitter (http://www.twitter.com) ) as well as the myriad of others, not forgetting the forums that are related to your industry can deliver amazing amounts of traffic and all of it targeted.
Try searching at your favourite search engine for (forum industry) remembering to replace industry for your own. Before diving in and delivering a sales spiel, I suggest you sign up, read the existing posts and become part of the community. You should look to nurture a relationship and deliver real value and advice and see sales as an added benefit to credibility you are building with a new group of people.
Links within your profile and, when relevant, within your forum posts, don’t do any harm for your SEO campaign either (See Secret Number 5) and combined with your expert knowledge can the SEO that the forum owner does on his site, gives another route to gaining search positions.
If your site is number one, what better number two position could there be than a forum post where you are explaining the virtues of your company and product?
The Dark Arts
Like many traditional marketing routes SEO also has it’s darker techniques. Often called Black Hat SEO, it generally takes the principles of traditional SEO and pushes the moral boundaries to deliver greater results, at a lower cost and in a much riskier manner.
These techniques can include automated content generation, automated link gathering and tricky redirections from one page to another. Make no mistake about it, if you undertake some of these techniques you will annoy a lot of people, whether that be site owners, searchers or the mass populous of the web.
The search engines themselves publicly frown on these techniques and offer guidance as to what they see as acceptable optimisation.
Google - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
Yahoo - http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/basics/basics-18.html
MSN - http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_REF_GuidelinesforOptimizingSite.htm
But that’s not to say that real financial rewards aren’t delivered. The reality is that if you are prepared to risk the brand that you have built up in your domain name for a short term financial win, black hat SEO can deliver tremendous results, but if you are found to be breeching the search engines guidelines you run the risk of that site being permanently banned from their engine.
Much discussion occurs over the latest and greatest cutting edge techniques for black hat SEO with many of the world’s largest search related earners and entrepreneurs participating in the discussions daily.There used to be only one place to go but now everyone and their dog thinks they are a dark art extremist. by seeking where you are most comfortable.
Please be aware this can lead you to an area of optimisation that can be extremely worthwhile but also potentially dangerous to your site and brand. Don’t say you haven’t been warned!
I Bet you Never Knew this about…
Google: Google was meant to be called Googal, the mathematical number of 1 followed by 100 zeros but a typo meant that the Google spelling stuck!
Yahoo: The name Yahoo as originally settled upon was an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,”
Bill Gates: Bill famously said, “WWW? Nice toy, but what a waste of time.”
Google Founders: According to the Times Rich List, Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the joint 34th richest people in the world. With a worth of £7.3Billion each
Google: Google are the largest aggregators of personal information online. By default they collect information on everything you do on Google’s sites, and potentially every site that you go to until (by default) at least 2038.
Do you want to know the most important of all tip you shall find?
Make sure you read all the way to the bottom …..
… as if you do you’ll find my phone number which you can use to call and get some one on one advice +44 7595 924 934 as long as you link to this post http://jason.sh/10-secrets-to-become-a-ranking-ranker-2009-04-15 and keep coming back here to my personal shell - so make sure to subscribe to the RSS Feed at http://jason.sh/feed
Speak with you soon!
Jason
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