The Best SEO Tip Ever

Let’s take it for granted that:

a. You want to be top of the search engine results
b. You understand about on-page optimization
c. Your website is up and running and indexed

Now what? How do you take your site from the middle of the pile and push and pull it slowly to the promised land of the top 5 positions?

And slowly here is the key. If you want short-term, quick-profit solutions (in other words ‘black hat’ techniques) you may as well stop reading now. I’m talking about long term investment into the future of your website and business.

I’m also not talking about ranking number 1 in Google for your business name or a 10 word phrase that absolutely no-one else would want to rank for. If you haven’t done that yet, you need to go away and get some very basic SEO grounding.

What I want to discuss is out-performing your competitors on the absolutely top-notch make-you-a-fortune keywords that bring laser-targeted traffic. In other words, the ones you’re only dreaming about ranking for!

Enough pre-amble; how do we do it?

Simple, really – we stand on the shoulders of giants. In other words, we look at what successful websites do and have done – and we use that information. No, we’re not going to re-invent the wheel and copy others’ business models, we’re going to take the cream from their hard work and pour it onto our sites!

Ranking in Google is about two things – it’s about relevance and it’s about popularity. We’ll assume that our sites are relevant to the traffic we’re seeking – no point attracting shoe shoppers if we’re selling ice cream! So it’s about popularity. And in Google’s case, that means backlinks. Put simply, the better the links to your site, the more they’ll see you as being popular, and the more they’ll pull your site to the top of the results.

Notice I said ‘better’, not ‘more’. In this case, quality is far more important than quantity. I can give you examples of sites with 300,000 inbound links that are far outranked by sites with 2000.

SEO experts talk about ranking number 1 in Google rather than Yahoo or MSN simply because Google is the search engine that most searchers use. Ironically, though, we need to use Yahoo to get to number one in Google. This is because Google is really bad at showing inbound links.

Yahoo Site Explorer (siteexplorer dot search dot yahoo dot com) is far better at this. YSE will show you which sites link to your competitors. And better still, they’ll rank them in terms of importance, so all the hard work’s done for you!

You just need to type in the URL of the site into the SEARCH box at the top of the screen, click on ‘Explore URL’, then click on ‘Inlinks’ and select ‘Except from this domain’ in the drop-down box. Lo-and-behold – a list of your competitor’s most important links. Not bad, eh?

So here’s your strategy:

First, draw up your list of must-have, top-drawer keywords and keyword phrases.

Second, search Google for them and take a note of the top 10 websites for each.

Third, examine each of the top 10 in YSE and see where the important links are coming from.

Fourth, filter these links into three categories: 1, the sites you won’t get links from; 2, the sites you’ll get links from with some hard work; 3, the sites you can get links from straight away (these can include blogs that allow comments, directories, article sites etc)

Fifth, get to work on acquiring links from the third category, then move on to the second.

This takes time, obviously, but not as much time as randomly searching for links that you’ll ultimately discover have no importance whatsoever.

If you follow this procedure diligently and methodically, I can guarantee that you’ll soon begin to see your sites slowly but surely marching up to the top of the rankings.