Strategies to Take Your Domain to the Top of the SERPs

When you have a presence on the web, your ultimate goal is to get ranked as high as possible in the search engine results pages.  When you look at the image below, you’ll see a common SERP (Search Engine Result Page) from Google.

 

            #1 is the sponsored spot that advertisers pay top dollar for.  #2 are the organic results that are returned when a user enters a keyword or phrase.  And #3 are the Google AdWords ads that marketers use to bid on keywords for exposure to searchers.

 

            Your goal is to not have to use the #1 and #3 paid spots – you want top ranking in the natural search engine results listings.  Sometimes, depending on what term you’re targeting, the competition can be tough.

 

            For starters, you have to cater to what Google wants.  They boast that they want to provide their searchers with relevant content, not spam.  So the best thing you can do is create a website, whether a regular content site or a blog, that has lots of great content centered around keywords and phrases for which you want to get indexed high.

 

            Aside from content, you also want to make sure the design of the site is appealing to spiders and robots, like Googlebots, that crawl your site.  If a spider encounters a design flaw, it can affect your indexing and rank because it may block it from getting to the good content.

 

            Some other SEO tips are:

 

·         Don’t use JavaScript – spiders can’t read it.  Some people create links in JavaScript and then wonder why all of their pages didn’t get indexed.  It’s because the spider couldn’t recognize that it was a link to follow it.

 

·         Don’t use frames on your site.  Instead of the spider easily being able to maneuver around your page, it gets blocked as if there are actually many little pages on your one page.  Use tables instead, if you need to break up content. 

 

·         Use text links using your keywords.  Instead of a link that says, “articles,” have it say, “dog training articles” if that’s one of the keyword phrases you’re shooting for.

 

·         Use the Google toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com to stay abreast of where your current PageRank is, so that you’ll know when a change you’ve made on your site helps or hurts your ranking.

 

·         Register a top-level domain.  Your site will rank higher if you create it on your own domain and hosting account rather than use a subdomain that’s just added onto someone else’s primary domain.

 

·         Use Meta Tags in your HTML code.  A title tag is 40-60 characters and is enclosed in the following code: <TITLE></TITLE>.  A description tag is like this: <META NAME=“description” CONTENT=“up to 250 characters”>.  Your keyword tag will appear like this: <META NAME=“keywords” CONTENT=“comma separated list”>.

 

·         Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) instead of headers or in conjunction with them to make it easy on Googlebots to get through content.

 

·         Keep the size of your files small enough to reduce load time and give them text code so that spiders can read what they are, even though they can’t “see” them. The following code will tell the spiders that they’ve encountered a picture of a dog, helping you get indexed for that keyword: <IMG src=“dog.gif” WIDTH=“400” HEIGHT=“150” ALT=“Dog”>. 

 

·         Use a tool like the one at www.netmechanic.com to determine what design flaws you need to fix to appeal to search engines.

 

With your content, you want to focus on making sure each page ranks well for its own keyword or phrase.  Density should fall in the range of 3-5%.  The tool located at: www.keyworddensity.com will tell you what your density is. 

 

To keep rising in the SERPs, you want to freshen up your site and give Googlebots new content to index n a regular basis.  They start out on a 90-day crawl, but if you have new content each time they come back, the time span shortens until you could get on a daily crawl schedule.

 

Some people get by this freshness quota by creating a news feed for their site, automatically giving it new content on a regular basis – usually daily.  You can create a feed from your own blog or use Yahoo News Feed to create a feed by subject matter.

 

When you’re trying to rank high in the SERPs, one thing you can do is bulk up your content.  Google likes it when you have more than 10 pages, and more than 100 is even better. 

 

Don’t add them all at once – instead, gradually build up to show Google you’re making a effort to create a valuable site and not a spam domain.  If you can’t crank out content quickly, consider investing in PLR articles for your niche.

 

Make sure you add your domain to Google to get indexed as soon as possible – don’t wait for the spiders to find your site.  Add it here: www.google.com/addurl and then check to see if they’ve indexed it.

 

You also want to start getting links pointing in your direction.  Relevant links from sites about the same subject matter will give you more of a boost in the SERPs than links pointing your direction that are not relevant at all.

 

Try to get a site with a PageRank of 4 or better to add a link to your domain.  You have to contact the site owner and request a link, and some will want a reciprocal link back to their own domain.

 

As your site rises in the ranks and you achieve a top 10 spot in the SERPs, your traffic will increase.  Go after long-tail and prime keywords and phrases because the long-tail will have fewer competitors.

 

Next let’s look at how you can use pay per click search engines to generate targeted traffic to your domain.  You have to be careful, or else you’ll wind up penniless because you didn’t pay attention to your spending limits.