If we know THE FORMULA for getting to Page One  in Google, then we have it made, right?

Well……..this is assuming you’re website has got some reasonable content, and of course has an offer that people might be interested in taking up.

Even the worse websites in the world will make some sales if they get enough traffic, so getting to page one has to be the goal doesn’t it?

Here are some of the important factors the search engines look at, broken down into two categories, on page, and off page.

On page means factors you control, such as the content on your website, html tags, structure, links (to other pages on your website), even design and the name and age of the domain play a part.

Off page means factors generally not controlled by you, incoming links, the anchor text (text you see on a link), the status of the page with the link to your website e.g. Is it an authority site, does the page have page rank, is the website and/or page in the same theme as your webpage, etc.

In years past, all you really had to do to get to page one, was optimize your site, stuff many keywords into your webpages, and that was it (well it was a bit more complicated than that, but the point I am making is that off site factors did not play a huge part of the equation back then).

These days, off site factors are generally more important, in other words Google places more of an emphasis of your off page factors when deciding where to rank your website.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look at on page factors, because absolutely you should, but it means you need to be paying attention to both.

The off page factors are one of the reasons why using web 2.0 social media sites such as squidoo.com, and others can dramatically help boosting your position in the SERP’s (Search Engine Result Page’s).

If you pick the right social media websites (squidoo is one) then because of their status in Google’s eyes as an authority site, a link coming to your website with the appropriate anchor text on a site such as squidoo is seen as more important than a link from (say) another domain you happened to just throw up recently.

And use the right combination of social media sites, with the right formula and bingo, you can get to page one quickly, following a step by step plan. Unless you trying to target a keyword like mortgage, which is going to take more effort to rank.

I’d actually say you probably would not want to rank for a keyword like that, because it’s going to get a lot of traffic, but how much of it is targeted to what your offering on your webpage?

It is possible to rank well for a keyword like that, but it’s a far longer process than ranking for a keyword that still has healthy competition. We recommend you always focus on keywords that will bring you targeted visitors.

Now it does get a little confusing, because part of our various plans we use to dominate a niche have an element which consists of not following the plan!

In other words, the step by step plan is to sometimes not follow the step by step plan. Make sense?

In other words to put you’re own little spin on any of the formula’s you use.

This does a number of things.

1. Eliminates Footprints.

Anytime you setup a website, you  leave footprints behind. It might be the ip address you used, or the fact that every time you setup a particular social media site, you always link to another page on another social media site, or that your bookmarks using social bookmarking sites always have the same titles. It could even be the username you use or the url is the same on all the social media sites you put content on.

Or a hundred other things.

Trust me when I say Google has the smarts already to find a lot of this type of stuff. They already know how to find relatively complex things like 3 way link exchanges. And if you’re paying for links, you’re just asking for trouble. Google pretty well knows all the major places offering links and can quickly identify you’re using them.

Remember that Google have access to ALL the data in the SERP’s (their results at least) and are able to perform queries we can’t. If you start thinking like that, you should come to the conclusion that it’s vital not do things the same way each time.

2. Competitive Edge

If you are mixing things up, you’re effectively testing new strategies, and might find a hidden little tip that ranks you very well. We find this all the time. We decide to throw in a new website for a particular promotion, and find wow this site has got some serious linking power.

If we were doing things the same way each time, we’d never find these hidden opportunities.

Anyway here are some things you need to consider when setting up your websites.

1. Make sure you use your keywords early in the conversation, or at least start using them there. Google places more emphasis on keywords used earlier.

2. Use of meta keywords tag, and stuffing keywords? Don’t bother, Google ignores this.

3. Your title tag should have your major keyword in it, preferable some other keywords as well. But it should also be human readable. Don’t bother using more than 64 characters, as Google only looks at the first 64. Remember also Google generally only indexes the first 10 words in a title tag.

4. When linking to internal pages, use text links (not pictures) and make sure you use your keywords in links. Yes anchor text in internal links matters!

5. Use the nofollow tags for any pages you don’t generally want indexed. e.g. Terms, Privacy policy, etc. By using nofollow tags you preserve the link power for other more important pages you do want to rank better.

6. Put some decent content up. Notice that we generally don’t have less than 600 word articles (unless it’s a video). Google favors pages with decent content that has more than a few words and a link.

7. One last tip for your external links from other sites, where possible try and control the anchor text and use your keywords in there, but also mix it up. If you think you’re website is not going to be blacklisted if 95% of the anchor text in your external links are just your major keyword, then you are in for a nasty shock.

We’ve tested this extensively, and eventually you will disappear or go so far down the SERP’s that for all intensive purposes you will not exist anyway if you do that.

Make it natural. Sure use your keywords, but mix it up, sometimes link with your domain name as anchor text, sometimes with a keyword, sometimes (rarely) with something unrelated.

And don’t just link to your root level url, link to specific articles sometimes, even tag pages, etc.

This is only a few of the things you need to be thinking about, but I hope I’ve got you thinking.

There’s lots of other tips like your description meta tag (and instances where it might be a better idea NOT to use one), header tags, and lots of other stuff.

I’ll expand on these tips in a future article otherwise this will end up as a novel!

Until next time….

Cheers

Tim