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By: Tony
Bury
Owner of "RedHotDomainNames.com"
Google is
the most popular search engine in the world. They power themselves
of course, offering rearch results at Yahoo and AOL. Google’s directory
is from Open Directory (www.dmoz.org).
Google tends
to update it’s listings once a month. They usually update at the
end of the month, and spider at the beginning of the month. So it
takes approximately 3 weeks from the time you submit information
for them to publish it. However this can fluctuate by a week in
either direction. Google’s spider is known as "GoogleBot."
Getting your
Website a number 1 ranking at Google is easy – when you know
how! My site has been ranked number 1 or thereabouts for the past
year at Google for the keywords "expired domain names"
and I did it with less than 24 hours’ work! This article gives you
a step by step description of how I achieved it, and a blueprint
that shows how you can do it too.
When I first
developed the site, my target was less ambitious than top ranking.
I’d read all the articles describing how much work it was to achieve
a high ranking, how you had to have pages and pages of content,
and how you had to have hundreds of inbound links to your site.
So I didn’t follow all the rules, and my initial target was just
to get onto the first page of search results for my selected keywords.
I though this positioning would be good enough to generate significant
traffic to my site.
However,
when my site reached the number 2 position after about 3 months,
I decided to do a little more optimization and go for number 1.
Sure enough, the following month my site was there in the top spot!
My ranking does occasionally slip to 2 or 3, but it’s usually back
up to number 1 again the following month, and if it slips for the
phrase "expired domain names", it’s often up at number
1 for "expired domain" at the same time.
Of course,
things change fast in the search engine world, and this article
is definitely tempting fate. By the time you read this, my site
may have disappeared from view altogether! But in the meantime,
here’s what I did — and what you should try - to get top ranking.
Step
1 - Keywords
Task: Choose your keywords
Time Needed: 2 hours
This
is of course the most important step of all!
It would be easy to get a number 1 ranking for the keywords, "Red
Hot Domain Names free expired domain name lists", but it would
be entirely useless as nobody would ever search on those keywords.
On the other hand, lots of people search on the keywords "mp3
downloads", but the traffic generated would be wasted on my
site, as the visitors wouldn’t find what they were looking for,
and would depart from my site very quickly!
The
trick is therefore to select a search phrase that is commonly used
and will bring significant traffic, but which is also specifically
relevant to your site. In selecting keywords, ask yourself this
question:
"Is
my site really what people are looking for when they type these
words?"
My
own site is dedicated to providing free expired domain name lists,
so some obvious search phrases were "domain names", "expired
domain names", and "expired domain name lists". But
which of these would bring the most traffic?
Of
course, you might want to go for a number one ranking for a number
of different key phrases for different pages on the site, but let’s
take this one step at a time.
Keyword
Popularity
Fortunately
there are tools to help you find the most commonly used search phrases.
The first is the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion.
This allows you to enter a search term, and returns a list of suggested
related search terms and how many times each search term was searched
on at Overture last month.
Entering
"Domain Names" threw up a lot more suggestions, including
"unclaimed domain names", "unregistered domain names"
and so on. By far the highest number of searches was performed on
the term "domain names", but it seemed clear to me that
it would be better to go for the more highly targeted traffic that
would come from one of the phrases specifically related to expired
domain names — and this phrase was indeed the most used of these.
At
the time that I completed this exercise, the Search Term Suggestion
Tool gave separate statistics for singular and plural words, for
example "expired domain" and "expired domains",
but unfortunately it no longer does so. This is, however, important
at Google (and indeed at Overture) as the two phrases return different
search results, as Websites are ranked differently for each. However,
the next tool we’ll look at does make this important distinction.
Keyword
Competition
The
other important factor in the choice of keyword is the "competition"
for that keyword from other Websites. It is more difficult to
achieve the number one ranking, or even a first page ranking, if
there are 10,000 (rather than 100) other Web pages indexed on your
chosen keywords. The tool at Word Tracker http://www.WordTracker.com
takes this factor into account and also differentiates between singular
and plural words in search terms.
There
is a free trial version that you’re free to use as often as you
like, which uses statistics from Alta Vista. There’s also a full
version priced from around $6 for a one day subscription. The full
version looks at the statistics from most major search engines and
allows you to analyse more keywords. As well as suggesting alternative
keywords and giving you the number of searches performed on each,
this tool looks at the number of competing Web pages for the keywords
and calculates a "Keyword Effectiveness Indicator" (KEI).
The KEI gives a high rating to popular keywords with few competing
Web pages, and a low rating to unpopular keywords with many competing
Web pages. It is therefore useful for identifying the keywords that
should be the most effective in generating traffic.
However,
remember that it is equally important to select the keywords most
relevant to your site, as it is to choose frequently-searched words
with little competition. It’s pointless being listed number 1 in
the search results if users fail to click through to your site because
it doesn’t seem relevant to their needs.
Step
2 - Content
Task: Develop content
Time Needed: 5 hours
Let’s
just repeat that…
"Content,
content, content!"
We all know
link popularity is the most important thing at Google. But think
about it: without content, not many sites will link to you. You
don’t even need much content, provided what you do have has the
right sort of keyword density. It’s definitely a question of having
the right content, rather than having a lot of content.
My Website really
has one purpose, which is to allow visitors to subscribe to the
free weekly expired domain names email list and newsletter. So I
needed content to:
- give visitors
a little background on expired domain names,
- explain what
a good opportunity they provide for acquiring a good quality domain
name, and
- provide a
subscription form.
I planned to
do all this on the home page in order to make it as quick and easy
as possible for visitors to subscribe, but you really do need more
than one page to get a good search engine ranking. I therefore started
out with a four page Website, containing:
- the Home
page,
- a Links page
with links to other domain name sites and Webmaster sites,
- a Partnerships
page explaining the partnership opportunities I offered to other
sites, and
- a Link To
Us page with text and banner links which other sites could use
to link back to mine.
There must
be some text on each page — usually at least 100 words (though
other search engines need more) on most pages. And, most importantly
for your ranking at Google, make sure you use your selected keywords
throughout the site. You must repeat them sufficiently to achieve
the right sort of "keyword density" without repeating
them so excessively that Google perceives your site as "spamming".
The easiest
way to do this is actually to forget all about keyword density,
and just sit down and write the sort of content that will interest
your visitors. After all, what Google ranks highly is the sort of
keyword density that is believed to occur in "genuine"
non-optimized content. Having written the content, you can then
analyse it and fine tune the keyword density.
The free tool
that I used to fine tune my keyword density was the Keyword Density
Analyser at www.keyworddensity.com.
If you plug your URL and selected keywords into this site, it will
calculate the keyword density for your visible text. It also analyses
all the other places in the HTML where you can insert keywords,
and even allows you to compare your Web page against another. This
gives you the information you’ll need to analyse the differences
between your Web page and competing pages that may be ranking higher
in the search engines. However, you do have to remember that keyword
density isn’t the most important factor in a Google ranking — the
other Web page may be ranked higher for different reasons (such
as link popularity).
I put my keywords
in the following places:
- HTML Title
— The Title is absolutely vital as this is what Google displays
in the search results as the title and link text of your page.
The text in the title therefore must make sense and encourage
the visitor to click through to your site.
- Visible
Text — I went back and edited my text until the keyword density
was around 5%.
- Image
ALT Tags — I made sure the ALT tag for my logo, which is
the first image displayed, was "expired domain names".
- Domain
Name
— Yes, you should choose your keywords before you choose your
domain name. I missed this one and only have two out of the three
keywords in my domain name!
- Outbound
Links
— It helps to have the keywords in both the text and the URLs
of outbound links (we’ll cover inbound links and link popularity
later).
- Heading
Tags
— I have a <H1> tag with "Free Expired Domain names"
at the top of the page. Keywords at the top of the page probably
carry more weight.
- Bold Text
— I have used bold text where it makes visual sense, and this
probably helps with Google as well.
- Close
together
— Keyword proximity is important. In other words, the phrase
"expired domain names" carries more weight than the
words in the sentence "Using a domain that has expired is
a good way to get good names".
- Throughout
the Website
— Google recognises "themes" by the use of keywords
repeated consistently throughout the Website, and increases the
ranking of each page for those keywords.
- Meta Tags
— These are covered in the next step
Do not use invisible
text (text that’s the same color as the background).
This is considered
to be spamming and will get you banned from some search engines.
Do not repeat
keywords too much. You may end up being penalised for it.
(Note to self — check the keyword density in this article — this
page may end up with the number 1 spot at Google!).
Step
3 - Meta Tags
Task: Select and enter your Meta tags
Time Needed: half an hour
Despite
all that’s said about the importance of HTML Meta Tags, they have
very little impact these days. After all, Google is trying to figure
out the relevance of your site for itself — obviously it’s going
to pay very little attention to what you might have to say about
your own site.
However,
these tags take very little time to set up properly, and a well-worded
Description Meta Tag is critical with other search engines that
display this content as the description of your site in their results
listings. Include your keywords once in the Description Meta Tag,
but, more importantly, make it a description that will attract visitors.
The
Keywords Meta tag is probably less important, but you might as well
include your most important keywords here.
Step
4 - Submit
Task: Submit your site
Time Needed: 2 minutes
This
step is the least important step of all — even less important than
insterting the Meta Tags. To get any sort of ranking at all you
must follow the remaining steps, and ensure that other sites link
to you. And if you already have sites linking to you, then the Googlebot
will find your site and spider it eventually.
But
I suppose there is a chance that submitting your site might just
have it spidered earlier. There’s no guarantee that submitting will
get your site spidered, or see it listen within a certain timeframe,
but the delay will allow you to get to work on your link popularity.
So
you might as well submit — I did and it only takes a couple of
minutes! Just visit www.google.com/addurl.html
and enter the URL of your site. Once you’ve done it, forget about
it and start to concentrate on your link popularity.
Link
Popularity
The
next 3 steps all focus on link popularity, but it’s not just the
number of incoming links that is important, it’s:
- who they’re
from,
- how they
link to you, and
- how many
links there are from their site.
Google
provides a search option through which you can find which Web pages
link to you by entering a search term in the form "link:www.yoururl.com"
Note, though, that this system only seems to return pages with a
PageRank above a certain level.
According
to this tool, my site reached number one with links from only about
a dozen other sites. I have another site on Flash which has just
achieved number 3 rank for the keywords "Free Flash Animations",
and according to the search, it has links from only 6 other sites!
However these are probably just the higher ranking sites — I do
know for a fact that Google has indexed more sites than this that
do link to mine. But one lesson I’ve learnt is that with Google,
quality matters more than quantity.
Step
5 - Establish Links
Task: Establish links from high ranking sites
Time Needed: 5 hours
The
most important thing about incoming links is who links to you. Google
applies more weight to links from sites that are themselves ranked
highly for your keywords. The fastest way to the top is therefore
not to spend days submitting to FFA lists (a waste of time!), or
even spend days setting up reciprocal links with other sites. Instead,
the best method is to concentrate on getting a small number of links
from important sites.
The
most important site of all is the Open Directory Project at DMOZ.
Getting listed at DMOZ is also the slowest step of all because all
submissions are reviewed by the editors, and this can take up to
2 or 3 months! There are several reasons why DMOZ is so important
to your ranking at Google:
- Google uses
DMOZ as its own directory, so you get two links for the price
of one — free. Also, Google weights links from its own directory
quite highly.
- A large number
of other sites use the directory at DMOZ, so you’ll probably generate
a lot more than two incoming links as a result of your listing
there.
- A listing
at DMOZ adds two lines to your site’s details in the Google search
results.
The
first line is your site’s description at DMOZ (where you’re allowed
some control over the details shown in the search results). So it’s
important to submit a short, snappy description that encourages
visitors to click through to your site. The description must, of
course, be accurate if it is to be approved by the DMOZ editors.
I used "Free expired domain name lists", which was a slight
mistake as it contains "name" in the singular rather than
"names" in the plural (which would match my chosen keywords
of "expired domain names").
The
second line that displays is the category in which your site is
listed at DMOZ, so make sure you submit your site to the most relevant
category.
As it takes so long to get listed at DMOZ, make sure you submit
early, but make sure your site content is complete and ready for
the editor’s review.
After you submit to DMOZ, the next step is to get links from a few
other high-ranking sites. As my site provides a free resource for
Webmasters looking for domain names, I searched for sites that listed
Webmaster tools and resources, such as Webmaster Tools Central,
and submitted links to them.
A
less obvious way to obtain high quality links from a high ranking
site is to write an article for a site like SitePoint. Although
SitePoint, along with most other sites that publish articles, will
not publish an article that solely promotes the author’s site, they
will publish a link to the author’s site in the bio about the author.
Clearly, writing an article takes a little time and effort, but
as well as getting yourself better known as a source of useful information,
the link to your site has the added advantage of not being buried
in a page full of other links. This is important for your ranking
at Google, because the more links there are on a page, the less
weighting is attached to each link. So think about writing an article
for a large, popular site that’s relevant to the topic of your Website.
Step
6 - Review Links
Task: Look at how you’re linked
Time Needed: 1.5 hours
The number of
other links that appear on the page that links to you is certainly
important. But the other important factor is the form of the link
itself. Google applies the most weight to text links that contain
keywords in the link text, so in my case I was looking for links
like Expired Domain Names rather than links that simply included
my url.
Obviously the
places where you have the most control over the form of backward
links are your own sites.
Step one is
therefore to ensure that the pages in your site are cross-linked
to each other using the keywords in the link text. One useful technique
is to include a site map, remembering to use your keywords in the
page descriptions as well as the link text.
Step two is
to ensure that your other Websites inter-link, again using your
keywords as the link text. You do have 2 or 3 (or more) Websites
linking to each other, don’t you? It’s the easiest way of all to
get links!
A word on Flash
and Google — One of the objections to using Flash for Website navigation
is that search engine spiders can’t follow the links.
Effectively,
a Flash navigation won’t add to your link popularity, and worse
still, pages may not be indexed at all.
However it’s
not well known that Google has been experimenting for some time
not only with indexing Flash files (.SWF files), but also with indexing
the links contained in them. Over the last few months I’ve seen
links from .SWF
files coming and going from the Google link results for my sites,
although recently they’ve disappeared again.
It looks as
though the time may be nearing when this one last objection to Flash
disappears. It’s too early yet to abandon HTML for navigation, but
provided you already have sufficient text or image links, it is
definitely time to start using Flash where you need visual impact
— but make sure you’re prepared, and have included links within
the Flash files too! And of course for maximum keyword weighting,
a text link will still be best.
Step
7 - Maximise Links
Task: Maximize incoming links
Time Needed: 10 hours
The number of
incoming links is an important part of link popularity, but if you’ve
followed all the steps so far, you should already achieve a high
Google rating once your DMOZ listing and the other links to you
have been indexed. As I’ve said, the DMOZ listing is probably the
slowest part of the process, and will probably take about 3 months.
Once you’ve
set up links from your own sites, it’s worth seeking out other places
where you have control over setting links. In my case I use Yahoo
Groups to distribute my email newsletter, and this gave me a page
at Yahoo Groups that I could customize with links back to my site.
Another Web
page I have control over is a top sites list for Domain Resources
at www.TopSiteLists.com. As the list owner, I was able to customize
the Web page to include a text link to my site at the top of the
page. Google is able to index dynamic Web pages with name/value
pairs in the URL search string (like http://www.topsitelists.com/bestsites/topresources/topsites.cgi?ID=1
), so each member’s link is to a separate page as far as Google
is concerned, but as the links are to similar (identical!) pages,
they don’t carry any more weight at Google. And this practice may
even have a detrimental effect at other search engines.
Once you’ve
exhausted your options at places where you have control over links,
the final step is to request reciprocal links from other Websites.
To achieve this, the first thing I did was to make it easy for other
Webmasters to link to me.
I set up a "Partnerships"
Web page, which, along with free content, also offers reciprocal
links to other Webmasters. I also set up a "Link To Us"
page that provided other Webmasters with the HTML code for both
text and various sizes of button and banner links. While text links
that incorporate your keywords are more beneficial to your Google
ranking and for generating traffic, many Webmasters prefer to use
graphics links, and at this stage, any link is better than none!
Simply placing
the invitation on my Website was enough to get a few reciprocal
links, but every article you read on the subject tells you that
you should search out similar high ranking sites to your own and
email the Webmasters, inviting them to swap links. This is excellent
advice, but I have to confess that I have just been too lazy to
do it!
By concentrating
on obtaining a smaller number of links of the right sort in the
right place, I have managed my number 1 ranking at Google with the
minimum of time and effort. But complacency is dangerous! If I am
to maintain my ranking, I will have to start building up my reciprocal
links. Once you have a high ranking site, be sure to tell this to
other Webmasters, and encourage them to swap links with you by explaining
how your ranking makes a reciprocal link with your own site so much
more valuable to those sites to which you link.
Step
8 - Update
Task: Keep updating
Time: ongoing
The last step
is to keep updating, as I believe Google attaches more weight to
recently updated pages. You will probably want to update your content
anyway, but as far as your Google ranking is concerned, little updates
often is best. In fact, once you have a high ranking, be very careful
not to make major changes that may upset it!
Finally
So that’s it!
It worked for me, and it may work for you. In the process, I got
some things right and some things wrong. Unfortunately, I can’t
tell you for sure which were which!
So what’s next?
Start on those doorway pages for other keywords? Start on that reciprocal
links program? Start on the next Website? No! The sun’s shining,
and I’m going out for a walk…
But when I come
back, maybe I’ll start on those reciprocal links!
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