The following are a few things you can do to help you rank high in Google. They won’t guarantee a high ranking but if you don’t do these things I can almost guarantee you won’t rank high.

You may have heard all of this already

For many of you this will be a review of things you already know. But I am surprised at the number of people who haven’t grasped all of these things yet, a specially items 1 through 4. That’s why I am going over them today.

If you want to rank high for your keyword then you need to do the following things.

1. Keywords in domain

Make sure that your keywords are in your domain.  For example if your keywords are “poodle manicures” then you would want to get poodlemanicures.com.

If poodlemanicures.com is not available then try different variations like: poodle-manicures.com or poodlemanicuresblog.com

2. Keywords in URL

When someone visits pages on your website is a good idea to have your key words in the URL.

For example you may have something like poodlemanicures.com/page1.htm which should be changed to poodlemanicures.com/poodle_manicures.htm

3. Keywords in title tag

Put your keyword phrase in the title tag on every page. If your keyword phrase was Poodle Manicures then you would have the following:

<title>Poodle Manicures</title>

You want your keyword phrase to appear in the title with as few other characters as possible.

Do not put your keyword in the title more than 2 or 3 times. Google sees this as keyword spamming and will rank your site lower.

4. Keywords in H1 tag

Put your keyword phrase in the h1 tag on every page. If your keyword phrase was Poodle Manicures then you would have the following:

<h1>Poodle Manicures</h1>

If the topic of the article was “how to do poodle manicures at home” then I would have the following in my H1 tag:

<h1>How to do poodle manicures at home</h1>

5. Have multiple pages of content with your keywords

I believe it’s very important to have more than one page of content for your specific keyword.

For example your keyword phrase was “poodle manicures” then you really need to have a minimum of 10 pages of content covering every aspect of poodle manicures.

You may need to take some time and brainstorm. Get creative and think of all the different things having to do with your keyword phrase. It may be difficult but in the end you’ll provide real value to your visitors.

This will help ensure that people visit more than one page on your website before leaving. I believe that Google is able to track how many pages a person visits before they leave your website. The more pages they visit the better it looks to Google. This will result in a higher ranking in Google.

You are going to need more than 1 page of content if you want to rank high.

6. Build back links

This seems to be everyone’s favorite topic. While building back links is important, it won’t do you any good unless you do the 5 things that I’ve mentioned above.

I think the importance of back links is decreasing. There so many ways to build them artificially that everyone is doing it and it has lost some of its effectiveness.

Google is also finding better ways of determining how useful your website is.

7. Know your competition

Do you know your competition? Have you done a Google search for your keyword phrase and looked at the websites of the top 10 search results?

You must research the following:

• How many back links they have?
• Do they encourage return visitors?
• Do they put their keyword phrase in their domain, URL, title tag, and H1 tag?
• How many pages of content do they have?

If you can’t answer these questions then you don’t know what you’re up against.

Other people are doing the same thing

The trouble with all of this is that everyone is doing the same thing. There are 1,000 people just like you that want to rank in the top 10 for your keyword phrase. The competition is growing and only 10 will make the first page of Google. And only 1 website will be at the top of the list.

The solution to all of this is not more search engine optimization. The solution is to do something different than everyone else.

I believe you have two options:

Option 1: Be more specific

Many people start out building websites around highly competitive keyword phrases. If you’re phrase is “real estate” for example you will be competing with millions of people.

Of those millions there are probably a few hundred with substantial marketing budgets (budgets with $1,000,000 or more). These guys have already read all the search engine optimization books out there. They’ve thrown tons of money at building back links.

You can’t compete with these people. But you can be more specific with your keyword phrase.

If my phrase were real estate then I would look for related keyword phrases that were very specific and had low competition. I’d look for a keyword phrase that had four or five words in it i.e. real estate Chicago metropolitan area

When you pick a very specific keyword phrase the competition drops dramatically. And you might actually have a chance of ranking in high in Google.

Option 2: Give more value

Your other option is to give more value. Go above and beyond what everyone else is doing. Invest the emotional energy required to answer peoples questions and give useful information.

Figure out what people really want and need and find a way to give it to them.

When you do this people will come back to your site on a regular basis. They will tell their friends and you will get traffic. And it won’t matter where you rank in Google.

I wrote about this in a recent post: Why you need return visitors if you want long-term traffic

Download the plugin

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/subscribe-to-comments/

Link from the video:

http://www.seoconsulting.de/cgi-bin/typo-generator.cgi

I got up this morning to check and respond to comments on my blog I found that there were 140 comments left overnight. 130 of them were complete spam. It took a few minutes to delete all of the garbage comments.

Because of this I am going to re-implement the captcha service for leaving a comment. In order to leave a comment you will now have to answer a simple math question i.e. 2+7=?.

I really don’t want to do this because it discourages comments and I love getting feedback from people and answering their questions.

But 130 garbage comments overnight is too many to sift through.

I am using Akismet to detect garbage comments and I could automatically throw away everything it marks as spam. But occasionally it will mark a good comment as spam and I don’t want to lose those comments.