Does dominating Google rankings quick and easy sound too good to be true? It really isn’t. Following are a bunch of surefire SEO tips that have kept hundreds of my client’s sites on top of Google for years, with new ones every month.

There’s a lot to cover and I hate long articles that drone on so I’ll keep the info short and sweet. Let’s start with the domain name.

Domain Names

Age: Make sure your domain name is at least six months old. If it’s more than a year old, that’s even better. Google often (but not always) likes domains to be at least six months old before indexing the site. How do they know? They use a “whois” database like the one at:

http://www.AllWhoIs.com.

Go there and enter your domain if you want to see what Google (and anyone else in the world) can instantly know about your site.

TLD Type: TLD stands for Top Level Domain, which is to say the letters after the dot. The best ones to have are “.com, .net. .org and .edu.” These get the most play in Google’s top 3 rankings for just about every keyword you can imagine, with “.com” and “.edu” being the best.

Embedded Keywords: If you have your main keyword (and ONLY your main keyword) as a dotcom domain name with even just halfway decent page text and some good inbound links you can usually nail number one on Google for that keyword. I’ve done it dozens of times. It’s a no brainer.

Dashes: Having a dash in your domain name might be bad for branding but it can open whole new doors of opportunity for your search engine optimization efforts. You see Google treats a dash as a null value (almost like a space) and can take them or leave them with equal indifference. So if your main keyword phrase is a few words long, you can place a dash between each word. If that’s taken, just try one dash separating the first and second words but leave the second and third word grouped together. You get the idea. Just keep trying combinations until you have one that works and scoop up the domain. Even if you sit on it for six months, you’ll have it when you want it.

Now on to the next big item; keywords. The best keyword embedded domain name in the world will mean little if nobody is searching for that keyword. That said; let’s find the best keywords possible for your site. Here’s how…

Keywords:

Keywords in Demand: Let’s snoop into Google’s keyword database and find some winners. Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and enter any keyword or phrase you think your target audience is looking for. Now click on the top header link to sort by desired search volume to see which words get the most searches.

Go Long: And don’t be afraid to use longer keywords as long as they get plenty of searches. Not only will this narrow the tasks of your workload for actual optimization but it will open all kinds of new options for finding great (dash laden) domain names and even help cut back on your competition.

Narrow Your Field: Now take the top ten or so relevant keywords and phrases and list them in order of “Approximate Monthly Searches Performed.” You might want to paste the keyword into one column of a spreadsheet and the number of searches into the next column. This next part takes a bit of math so we might as well let Excel do it.

Competition:

Competition; Less is Better: “Less is better.” Well that’s the understatement of the year. But how do you know how much competition you will be up against? It’s easy. Simple division does the trick nicely. Here’s how…

Google It: Go to Google and paste in your first keyword phrase. Look in the upper right area of the page and see how many pages you will be competing against if you try to optimize for that keyword (Results 1 – 10 of about 123,000,000 for “keyword”.) Now record that number in the cell to the right of “searches performed.” You can go ahead and do the same for each keyword. When you have all the info you need have Excel divide the number of “competing pages” by the number of “searches performed.” The lower the resulting ratio; the better your chances. Your best bet is to take the lowest ratio number with the highest number of “searches performed.” This is your optimal target.

Even More: But we’re not done yet! Now find the next best two runnerup keywords and write them down in order of importance. We’ll need them soon.

Content:

The King Lives!: You’re probably sick of hearing it but content really is king. Developing search engine friendly, well optimized content (for REAL people) is key to your success. Google can read a Web page just like a person thanks to its natural text algorithm. So keyword spamming and robotic writing do not work with Google. But here’s what DOES work…

Keep it Real: Call a close friend and tell him or her exactly what you want to tell your web visitors. Then as quick as you can write it down, as close to “word for word” as you can remember. Just let the words flow. You can fix spelling and grammar later.

Fitting In: Now, with your list of three keywords, go back through your text and fit your most important keyword as close to the beginning of the first sentence as possible. Now go ahead and place your number two keyword someplace else toward the beginning of your first paragraph. Your third keyword should go into the beginning of the second paragraph if possible.

Now use only one of your keywords for each of the next three paragraphs. Try to make them fit naturally toward the beginning sentence or two of each paragraph.

Throw in a Curve: Now use a reverse order for the very last paragraph. Put your least important keyword (number 3 pick) at the beginning of the paragraph and your best keyword at the end. This shows consistency (at least as far as Google is concerned.)

Last but not least, do not repeat any keyword more than three or four times on a page. I stick with a 3 x 3 method and it works great (3 keywords each mentioned 3 times over the course of about 9 paragraphs.)

Getting Links and Monitoring Your Site:

Inbound Links: Having high quality inbound links can account for more than 75% of your search engine ranking success. Getting these links is the crucial step that will get you over the top. At the same time you need to monitor your progress and your site’s status (how search engine REALLY see it). This will tell you not just where you are – but where you are likely to be. In the old days, we had to do all of the link work and monitoring by hand. And believe me, it took a long time (I averaged about 16 hours per week; per site!) My advice is to find a good SEO tool and let it do the tough and repetitive work for you. If you get hold of the right product, it’s the best money you’ll ever spend.

I started out with WebPosition Pro and used it for a couple years but switched to another tool that has automated linking, which I find to be the most time-consuming and now most important aspect of SEO on Google. This was probably a good call since Web Position was recently banned by Google for abuse.

Anyway, here are my results for both…

http://www.SE0elite.com Cost = $167 (lifetime free upgrades and no annual fees)

Personal Results: 121 top 5 rankings on Google in 3 weeks – Mostly 1’s and 2’s. Best Features: Finds best link partners; Automates link process; Finds “Google “authority sites.”

http://www.WebPosition.com Cost = $389 WebPosition Pro or $149 Standard (plus $99 per year subscription fees for either)

Personal Results: 44 top 5 rankings in Google in eight weeks – Mostly 3’s and 4’s. Best Features: Site Monitoring (recently banned by Google); Great reporting; Site Critic

Now you’re ready to dominate Google. Good luck!

In case your new to this whole thing (internet in general) or simply in denial about the facts; Google is the Number 1, Greatest, Most Powerful and Well Known Search engine there is. A simple expression of this is shown by the use of two little words; “Google It”. Have you heard of anyone legitimately say the term “Yahoo It”? or “MSN Search It”?… Probably not. Google is so popular that it has become one of those brands synonymous with the thing it was designed for. Similar to the term “Photoshop It” when relating to image manipulation. Google is so powerful in fact that they own “Earth” (get it? – if not just type in Google Earth into Google).

Now I don’t want to sound like Google’s press agent but I just want to stress the value of utilising Google to your own ends. If you properly utilise Google then you can get serious exposure to your site. That in turn leads to all kinds of positive outcomes.

A couple of ways to “dominate Google” are as follows:

Number One;-
Google Adwords – Google Adwords is a great tool to use to get your site seen on relevant sites or on relevant search terms via a small text, image or video ad. This type of advertising can be a little pricey but if you know how to use it then it can be real effective.

Number Two;-
Organic Search Results – Plain and simply this is the best way to get exposure for your site.  If you get your site on the first page of Google then you are practically guaranteed to get tonnes of targeted traffic to your site. The problem is that everyone wants this and there s a lot of completion. It can take many months of hard work to get your site anywhere near the top of Google and that’s if you actually know what you’re doing. If you don’t then you can basically forget this technique until you’ve learned how it works. The best part about this is that you can do it (usually) for free or for very cheap because it all involves your own personal effort.

Number Three;-
Pay Someone To Do It For You – This sounds so incredibly appealing, and it is. The only problem (for most) is that it can cost up to and over $30,000 for only a few keyword terms. If you can spare $30,000 or more then by all means do this but for the vast majority it isn’t really a viable option.

Number Four;-
Pray Really Hard – This is in no way a scientific method but you never know, a miracle may just happen for you.

These are the most obvious methods to dominate Google. Remember it is very important not to try and trick Google into ranking your site high. Even if you were able to do so it surely wouldn’t last long. Google would eventually find you and wouldn’t be very happy with what you had done.

Always try to keep your site relevant, interesting and informative on the subject which you promote it on. For example if you promote it as a site to care for trees, don’t have the site be totally about avionics. Keep the content relevant. You can have some other stuff on there too but try to keep the main focus obvious and coherent.

In short, if you want to be successful online then you should seriously consider trying to as popular as possible on Google. it’s a gold mine just waiting to happen!

Dominate Google With Cheap Video Advertising And Let The Pro’s Do It For You!

Google’s mission, according to its corporate web site, is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”[1]. This may be their purpose, but they are financing this goal by dominating the long tail of the world wide web. Through its network of web properties, web applications and services, Google is brilliantly plotting to virtually own your online eye-time.

In a span of only 10 years, Google has grown from the graduate-level computer science project of Larry Page and Sergey Brin into the most valuable and pervasive network of properties and technologies on the world wide web.

Google’s properties include Google Search, Gmail, Google Reader, Google Code, Google Apps Partner Edition, iGoogle, Google Sites, YouTube, Maps, News, Shopping Groups, Books, Scholar, Finance, Blogger and too many others to list. There is scarcely a web site that Google does not touch in some way, whether it be via AdWords, AdSense, Analytics or Search.

Additionally, through the acquisition of technologies such as Urchin (now Google Analytics) and DoubleClick, Google is able to study how web users spend their time online, and position relevant advertising alongside nearly every piece of information that travels across the world wide web.

Google is also greatly extending its reach by offering a re-brandable version of Google Apps to Internet Service Providers, businesses, educational institutions and non-profit organizations. This strategic move allows Google to to expand its empire by offering improved infrastructure to the barbarians like the Romans did two thousand years ago.

Six Degrees of Google

In his book “Linked”[2], Albert-László Barabási explores the ideas of Graph Theory as they apply to various types of networks. An example of Graph Theory at work is the popular game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in which a player picks any random or obscure actor and another tries to connect them to Kevin Bacon is 6 links or less. Barabási explains, using Graph Theory, that there is nothing particularly unusual about Kevin Bacon’s position in Hollywood circles. In fact all entities or nodes in a given network are connected to all others by an astonishingly small number of links. For instance, Barabási found that every web page is connected to every other one of the billions of pages on the world wide web by an average of only 19 links or degrees of separation.

The close connection between all nodes in a graph, as Barabási explains, is possible due to what are known as Super Nodes[2], or nodes that have a very large number of links to other nodes. Super Nodes, within any graph, are the most important nodes because they connect all the others and shorten the distance between any two smaller nodes. This concept is exactly what Larry Page stumbled upon when he created the idea of PageRank[3]. Web pages or web sites with the most links are the super nodes of the world wide web. Google is arguably the largest of the super nodes on the world wide web. If the world wide web has a center, it is likely to be Google.

Google has discovered, however, that it can extend beyond being a super node to which all other nodes connect. By disseminating itself in the form of Analytics, AdSense, and AdWords, it can become part of every other node.

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin were negotiating with Wall Street underwriters to take Google public, there were many business experts who could not understand how their business model made money – or sense for that matter.[1] These experts, if you will pardon the pun, were rather short-sighted and missed the fact that Google is able to make money by what is known as the long tail, or selling a large number of items in small quantities.

In his book titled The Long Tail[4], Chris Anderson explains how a study of music downloads on Rhapsody demonstrates the long tail phenomenon. Mr. Anderson found that though the blockbuster hits, which account for 20% of music titles, may enjoy millions of downloads, the remianing 80% of titles or non-hits, when added together, account for a much larger volume of online music sales.

Google has masterfully positioned itself, through its vast network of online properties and tools and extensive reach, to capitalize on the long tail by earning a few pennies from the mouse clicks of billions of web users. The long tail applies to Google’s model because each text ad may only be clicked a few times, but there are many millions of ads and many billions of clicks.

All roads, as the saying goes, may lead to Rome, but on the world wide web, all nodes – and mouse clicks – lead to Google.

———————-
1. http://www.google.com/corporate/
2. Barabási, Albert-László. 2003. “Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life.” New York: Plume.
3. Vise, David A., and Mark Malseed. The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media and Technology Success of Our Time. Paperback ed. Dell Pub., 2006.
4. Anderson, Chris (2006). The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. New York: Hyperion. ISBN 1-4013-0237-8.