How To Get #1 Ranking In Google
A few months ago there was another search engine shake up by Google. You may have noticed. Sites that use to rank #1 are no longer there. Your site may have changed ranking – for the better or for the worse. Either way, I’m going to explain why it may have changed and what you can do to make sure that you rank #1 for many if not all of your keyword terms and/or your website in the future.
As the competition for keywords stiffens and website owners have made tweaks to their sites based on what it appeared search engines favored before, now engines like Google have made a few alorithim changes that emphasize something pretty old school SEO – your domain name.
For example, for a while I ranked #1 for one of my keyword term: Article Marketing Tips. After the changes at Google, I dropped to number #2. After some investigation on my part based on the competitor’s pagerank, content relevancy, age, backlinks, freshness, etc. I recognized that this site stepped up to the #1 spot because they had one thing that I did not have and that was the keyword term specifically in their domain name.
Having your keyword term in your url is more important than ever now. This was just one of thousands of examples of sites that had a position change due to keyword relevancy in the main url. So here is what I suggest:
1. If you are just starting out and haven’t begun to set up your site, etc., then you are in a great position. Do the keyword research necessary to figure out what your primary target keyword term should be and secure a SEO friendly domain name for that term.
2. If you are already established and have no intentions of changing your main url because of the hassle it may bring about for your or because of your business branding (that’s my excuse:)– then there is always the strategy of securing keyword rich domain names as landing pages, squeeze pages, product sales pages, etc.
Luckily for me, #2 spot isn’t so bad. I still get a great deal of traffic for this term, but I have been at this for years, and I work hard on optimizing all of my content including my site for my terms.
If you are new to the web, the domain url you select could truly mean visibility vs. obscurity for your site, so take the time and choose wisely. Do your homework. And if I were you, I’d secure as many as I could. The .com names are being snatched while you are reading this article. At the prices of domain names now (9 or 10 bucks), there is no excuse to lock in your preferred terms with the .com, .net, or .org extensions.
Lisa Angelettie
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Great article. I am a newb in the article marketing + many more other strategies to hit # 1. Since the lastest Google revamp to its algorithm, they have pushed my fairly new site up from 8-9-10, to 5-th. Great for me. But it’s now stuck there once again. What other strategies have you done other than article marketing? And do you also do these manually or with a piece of software? Cheers
That’s great that you’ve moved up and you have really great placement for being a fairly new site! Things that improve search engine placement include quality backlinking (like with article marketing, guest blogging, etc.), social media (it’s true that search engines are beginning to look at how relevant your site in social media), submit your site to a few key directories, and lastly having the keyword in the url helps a tremendous amount.
If you are #5 and the sites in front of you are heavy hitters (for example – about.com or New York Times), then it will take time to move higher. Much Success!
I appreciate your feedback with this matter! It looks like I’ve been doing ALL of what you’re saying. However, I have a few ” weak ” looking .edu’s above me, but having my keyword in the URL + the rest that you mentioned is all up to par! I’ve been doing more comment blogging and social bookmarking, but I don’t see a huge jump with that at all. I’ll continue to do so however. More opinions is greatly appreciated.
Do you have a Start-Finish way of gaining traffic for your own projects? I have not had the chance to view your entire site, but it looks great!
Cheers,
Hi again:)
Ranking in the search engines is a slow and steady race. The things you are doing with social media, etc. will take time to impact your ranking. And yes- I do have a start to finish strategy in place for my business.