Achieve Top Ranking

SEO Is getting the #1 ranking for your website at particular keywords-targeted in major search engine.

Actually there are 3 critical steps we should do in the SEO :

1. Like any business, you need to identify your audience (your target market). Not just are you setting your Busby SEO Test Contest website’s goals and profiling your audience, at this stage you are also scouting your competition and evaluating what you need to do in order to ‘dominate’ this particular sector.

2. You obtain steps to get your website rank as high as possible in the search engines for those keywords that this audience is most likely to use. This involves things you do to the site itself (if you are creating a new website then you should ensure that it is search engine friendly from the ground up). It moreover includes off-site activities which are all geared towards the process of having other Busby SEO Test Contest websites link to yours.

3. You continually track your website’s progress in the search engines and make adjustments to your SEO tactic as necessary.

Determine How Search Engines Work in fact

It goes without saying that if you want to rank #1 for your target keywords, you need to know how search engines work. This means that you must not just know what factors search engines use in ranking websites, but also how they ‘read’ web pages and ‘index’ them (This topic is discussed in detail in the next chapter).

Search engines have evolved considerably in the last few years, and continue to update their ranking algorithms periodically. So apart from learning how search engines work right now, it will also pay if you:

• comprehend what each search engine is trying to achieve when ranking websites
• How you can path changes in search engine algorithms

How we can keep updated on the latest changes in the search engine world

The most important thing about SEO is that an ‘out-of-the-box’ formula for achieving top rankings will not work as well as a customized, one-on-one strategy for every project.

Yes, a cookie-cutter approach will work – but it won’t be as useful as a custom-made battle plan for your website. The general principles will always apply to your website, but there’s a significant component of analysis, drawing results and then determining what to do in light of those conclusions.

At the final of the day, it is YOUR SEO plan. You will decide what to focus on, you will be the one doing competitive analysis and evaluating how difficult or easy it will be for your website to rank for particular keywords.

Every website has different targets – these goals will in turn determine what sort of keywords you will be targeting, what the composition of your audience will be, the competitiveness of your target market and your willingness to spend money / put in the time and effort.

Search Engine Optimization (or, if you want to be strictly correct, Search Marketing) is not a ‘get rich quick’ scheme nor is it about being paid short-term, temporary results at the risk of getting your website penalized by the search engines.

Just to make things clear, this is not an ethical concern for me – as far as I am concerned (you might think differently), search engines provide a service, and their guidelines are not ‘the law’, they are just generalized statements on what works best.

Those statements are a little misleading and do not give a comprehend picture of what it takes to rank for keywords in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

Though, putting your website at risk by actively pursuing optimization policies that openly abuse search engine policies and are detectable by search engines is foolishness.

For myself (once again, you are entitled to your opinion) I think there are far better ways to dominate the SERPs without resorting to tricks or anything that will get your website penalized from Google or MSN or Yahoo.

So that is one aspect of thinking long term – if you are doing SEO for short term gains, in major cases it is not SEO but tricks to take advantages of a search engine’s limitations.

Get free traffic for your sites - this is possible.

There is no big hush-hush behind Google’s popularity. Google positioned itself as a ‘pure’ search engine;

Yahoo has always been a Search Engine and MSN joined the game lately. The ‘purity’ and center of attention of Google’s search, combined with their head start (Google provided search results for Yahoo early on) means that Google are just way ahead, and too tough to catch.

What this means for us search marketers is that we have to pay close attention to what Google says, and more importantly, to what Google wants to achieve with its search engine rankings.

Ranking for Google is a matter of finding that web page that is considered the most related to the search query and is from a website that is measured an authority on the subject and is trusted.

Relevance

Relevance is measured by the information the search engine can read from a Busby SEO Test Contest web page. As I stated earlier, each web page is a point of entry for your website, and you can (and should) optimize your website so that each web page is targeting a different keyword.

There are several factors on a web page that are used to measure relevance, with the Title tag and keyword usage on the page being the two most vital factors being used to measure relevance.

If a page is about ‘how to lose weight’ and the searcher has entered ‘how to build a boat’, this page is not going to be considered related and thus will not be part of results. On the other hand, a page on ‘building your own boat on a budget’ may be considered moderately related to the search query and therefore would stand a much better chance of appearing in the SERPs.

On-page SEO – changes made to your web pages to get better search engine rankings – is mainly concerned with increasing the relevance of your web pages to their target keywords (you will read more about this in later articles).

Authority

Authority is a ‘social’ gauge of how much a particular website or a particular web page is considered THE source on a particular topic. Authority measures expertise, and more importantly, the acknowledgement of that expertise within your industry and outside too.

If you run a vernon golf accessories website and you have lots of other golfing sites linking to yours, it implies (to Google) that your website is measured a somewhat authoritative source on ‘golf accessories’. And if you have non-golfing sites linking to you as well, this will further enhance your ‘authority’ status, although this is tempered by the fact that the opinion of sites within your niche holds a greater value (because they themselves
are considered authorities on the subject).

Here is a fast list of the types of links that will suggest authority to your website – from least useful to the most:

• Site with few backlinks and unrelated to your site’s niche.
• Site with many backlinks (some authority) and unrelated to your site’s topic.
• Site with few backlinks and closely related to your site’s niche.
• Site with many backlinks (some authority) and closely related to your site’s niche.

Authority links are a key part of the link building procedure – hunting such links is an art as much as a science, and I will be showing you how in later articles when we talk about link building.

Individual Busby SEO Test Contest web pages can also have authority on the same lines as websites do - which is why getting links to individual pages of your website (also known as deep linking) is a very vital part of the link building process.

Trust

Trust is a measure of how reliable a website is in providing correct information. Google uses several factors to measure trust – authority and relevance are two of them and so are links from other ‘trusted’ sites.

Another trust-measuring issue is time, and it is this bit that has had SEOs and webmasters going crazy over what is now normally called as the ‘sandbox’.

The ‘sandbox’ notices to a number of filters in Google’s ranking algorithm that prevent a website or web page from ranking highly until it has reached a particular threshold.

Does the sandbox really exist? Google says that a set of quality-measuring filters could be mistaken for a sandbox because sometimes their effect can be the same as that of the suggested sandbox effect.

SEOs disagree, but here I tend to side with Google – there is no need for Google to intentionally hold back websites, but they do have a clear need to establish a website’s quality, and time-based filters that measure a site’s age, rate of updates, age of authority links, etc are a useful means of measuring that value.

Trust takes time to build up, but there are several strategies (all within Google’s guidelines) that you can just to boost your site’s trust and authority. However, ranking in Google is still a long term game, so expect to have to wait. Depending on your chosen niche and your SEO strategy, it could be anywhere from 6 months to 18 months.

All three factors have some measure of overlapping amongst them. Anchor text can be used both to measure relevance and to measure authority, while links from a high ranking, popular website can convey both authority and trust to your website.

Find out the latest SEO strategy to get free traffic.