How to Rank Well In Google

If you’re reading my blog, I’m sure you’re interested in knowing what makes a site rank well in Google. This is the coveted knowledge all internet marketers seek. Aren’t we all looking for a page 1 ranking? Wouldn’t you kill to know how to achieve a #1 ranking?

As I mentioned in my last post, Rand Fishkin outed the #1 ranked site for “SEO Company”. The post did not claim that the site used black hat practices, but it does use fairly obvious link building methods. Their links screamed link anchor text optimization, which is a solid sign that they are manipulating their anchor text. This is something we all do, but Google does not like. Our job as SEOs is to make our links as natural as possible so that competitors cannot publicly out you. So let’s dig in deep here and look at what factors are allowing this site to rank #1 for “SEO Company”. Not only has it achieved a #1 ranking for this term, but it has also received site links. Site links are read as a type of “authority” by searchers because it makes the listing look more important. So how did this site rank number one in Google?

What we’re about to do is a twofold explanation; you will learn how to do two things. First, this will help you understand how to research a niche and determine how competitive it is and how long it may take to dominate the niche. I will show “how” the site is ranking. The second thing this allows you to do is look under the hood of your competition and figure out what they’re up to. If you go head to head with another internet marketer, here is how you’ll discover what they’re doing.

On Site Optimization

First, let’s dispel some bs ideas about SEO. First, the content is king thing. Second, that keyword density matters.

So check out the site: nationalpositions.com

A few things about the on site content. It isn’t that “great”. Of course, it isn’t “spammy”, it isn’t scrapped, it isn’t auto generated, and it is original. That is the point where “quality” no longer matters, unless you’re doing link bait of course. Overall though, there isn’t too much about this site’s home page that is really impressive. Also I  want you to use your browsers find command. The phrase “SEO Company” does not appear once! The word SEO appears 4 times and the word company appears 3 times, but neither of them together. According to SEO Quake the keyword density of SEO is 0.37 and the density of company is 0.19. So this 3% or 5% or whatever people bs about is NOT true. This information is not public, nobody knows it, and it is not that big of a factor in your ranking. Yes, using a keyword a few times does help, but continuous use of a keyword does not make a document more authoritative for the keyword. A page does not even require the use of the keyword to rank for it. You’re welcome to believe what you like, but here is an example of the #1 ranked site for “SEO Company”, but has a 0% keyword density for that phrase!

So what is the MOST important on site optimization factor in SEO? Well my buddy Griz talked about it the other day on his How to Make Money Online blog. It is the content enclosed in the title tag. The title tag is the most important on site factor that needs to be optimized. So let’s look at this site’s title tag.

Search Engine Optimization Los Angeles, SEO Los Angeles Company

As you’ll see, the site uses SEO and Company in their title tag. This gives their page strong on site authority for the words SEO and Company. This, plus the slight on site usage, is combined with one more factor (which I’ll discuss in a second) and allows them to rank for the term. One thing you’ll notice is that this site does not do what most would suggest, which is to put “SEO Company” first in the title. Generally, this would be a weakness for a site. You could be more competitive by putting SEO Company up front in the title, but this site has enough authority for “SEO Company” that they can place the keywords toward the end. (Again, we’ll get to that authority in a moment)

And lastly, let’s talk about semantics. So this site doesn’t use “SEO Company” exactly on their home page, but how did they manage to not trip the Google bomb flag and how did they rank for a term they do not use? Cough cough… its called semantics … cough cough. Go read my post about SEO and Semantics here.  Google understands word relationships. They have indexed the entire web, which allows them to learn some impressive things about the English language, how words relate, what niches words belong to, and what niches are related. SEO relates to all SEO terms, SEO niche relates to Internet Marketing niche, and the Internet Marketing niche relates to the Make Money Online niche.  There is a relationship, although separated, between the key phrases “SEO” and “How to Make Money Online”. So when I passed Griz a link earlier, it is going to help more than if I had a blog about dogs. Google knows SEO is related to making money online. (I hope that helps a little with Forbes Griz =P) I carry a good bit of authority so far for the term SEO and Google can evaluate the relation of this blog’s niche to Griz’s. And on the site we’re reviewing, Google can make a relation between “SEO Company”,  “SEO”, and “Search Engine Optimization”.

The lesson to learn from this is to focus more on using long tails and semantically related keywords than just using the exact phrase over and over. First, keyword density is not all it is made out to be. Why waste your content on excessive use of your keyword when you could simple reinforces it with semantically related keywords and long tails. This still supports your primary phrase and allows you to rank for more terms.

So HOW is it Ranking?

Ok, so if you were patient enough to read this far, you are still wondering “well how DID it rank”. It doesn’t use the exact phrase in the title. It doesn’t have a high density of the words. And it doesn’t even use the phrase once! They’re breaking all the content rules, but Google still considers them the top SEO Company.

It’s nothing new. It’s the thing that’s been said over and over. LINKS. And more importantly, KEYWORD anchored links.

Again, I won’t say content isn’t important. It plays a variety of roles. It is what your visitors read. It communicates keywords. And, it can be used to generate links. So there are times when content is important, but it is not what gets you ranked.

Again to recap. The content isn’t that great. No keyword density or any usage for the exact keyword. The separate keywords are used, but very little. All the traditional factors are almost absent. So let’s get our hands dirty and throw this site into SEO Elite. If you don’t have this program, get it. If you don’t have the money, I understand, but this is my MOST powerful tool and you’re about to see why. This program does link searches in all major search engines. It combines the results from them all. Then it goes to each of the sites that link to the site you entered and it checks the link, nofollow/dofollow, anchor text, page PR, site title, site IP, and more. It then puts it all together and performs useful calculations. You can quickly sort this information and understand exactly WHY a site ranks.

Here is a preview of the keywords present in the anchored links. Before I show it, I’d like to better explain how this works, let’s show an example. If a page links to this site using “LA SEO Company”, then another with “Awesome SEO Company”, and then another with “Internet Marketing Company”, you would get something like this.

1. Company – 3
2. SEO – 2
3. Internet -1
4. Marketing -1
5. LA – 1
6. Awesome – 1

(and so you know, the link that says “Internet Marketing Company” would help enforce the authority for the word Company, which would help the ranking for SEO Company, but not as much as the exact link “SEO Company”  would)

So here are the results from SEO Elite.

As you can see, the words SEO and Company dominate by a large margin. The vast majority of the links coming in use those keywords. This next image gives an even stronger view of the anchor text. This option allows you to input keywords and phrases to see how many anchors use that key phrase and calculations
the percentage.

As you can see, this site has a TON of links coming in with the words SEO and Company. Over HALF of all their links include the exact phrase “SEO Company”, while 56% feature the word Company and ALMOST 70% of their links include the anchor text SEO!

This is why they rank for SEO Company. One last time: Google ranks sites primarily based off the authority passed to them via links! And they use the words used as the anchors to determine rankings for keywords! The more anchored links you have for a key phrase, the higher you will rank for that key phrase (generally). Of course, there is more to SEO than that. But if you want a “dummies guide to SEO” in a quick nutshell, it’s in those two images. So if you’re not ranking for your keywords, I want you to ask yourself “how many keyword anchor links have I gotten for this site?”. When you get links, what words do you use? Do you use article marketing to grab anchored links? Do you use directory submissions? Link exchanges? Do you make effort to get the RIGHT anchor text? Do you even make the effort to GET the links? Do you spend more time getting links, reading, or writing content? (cough.. it should be getting links)

What about low quality links?

Ah… a topic I’ve talked about a few times and I was very excited when this example came up. Generally, I feel bad outing a site’s links publicly and will usually never do it, but Rand went ahead it did it for me, so there is no more harm in me using the example.

So you think directories are worthless? LOL

Look at this:

Look how many of their links are from directories, resource pages, link pages, and link exchanges. I even see an article site in there. Next, look at the titles. It’s all a bunch of unrelated pages. And want to see one of their strongest “SEO Company” links? This page is a PR 3 and links to it with the desired anchor text. The page is basically a list of exchanges. These are probably all exchanged and paid links. These are the links are the “gurus” tell you to NOT get. People go on about how exchanges are useless. They talk about how submissions are dead.

Well this site ranks for the phrase SEO Company. A phrase with 33,100 average monthly searches and an average CPC of $6.55. Yummy. Not the volume of stuff like “make money online”, but you could make a pretty penny with an Adsense blog in a niche with those stats. And this site got the rank using a ton of directories, link exchanges, submissions, resource pages, and probably paid links. It pays to know how to rank well in Google.

Can Low Quality Links Hurt?

Ah.. Well, maybe. Honestly, they are not the best long term strategy. If you’re making a flagship in an ultra competitive niche, I would not suggest these practices. Google doesn’t like link manipulation like this. Now that Rand has made this site’s link profile public and thrown it in the face of the SEO community, it is likely that this site will get slapped. This is why some of my fellow bloggers have stopped doing case studies. We show our stuff, it gets reported, and we get slapped. This is because; Google does not want you to build links. When I do SEO on bigger sites, like this one, I do not go all out on these types of links. Also, I would not use this as a professional SEO tactic. But, this is an SEO and Make Money blog. I’m not interested in talking about “ethical” SEO only. I’m interested in what gets a site ranked, what gets it traffic, and what gets me paid.

So here is something to consider. Google obviously relies heavily on hand edits and human inspections. Their also not great at detecting all SEO practices (they are pretty good though). This means you can get away with a lot as long as nobody notices or cares enough to report you. There are several things you can do to create enough doubt to prevent a reporting. The site we used as an example has been around for three years before someone finally outed them and it took Rand, who is one of the net’s most popular SEO’s, who is notorious for exposing sites in a way people don’t like. There isn’t nearly as much risk for your scrapbooking blog.

(btw, I’m not knocking Rand, his blog is awesome. I don’t think I’ll get his attention on page 2 or 3, but I’ll be a little worried when I make it to page one for SEO)

So That’s How It’s Done

I talk about SEO and will continue to talk about it, because I love the topic, but for the most part I just showed you how SEO works. There are fine details and particulars that we can discuss, but it really comes down to building authority with links. SEO Elite is a big purchase, but I hope this showed you some of the potential of the tool. It can do a lot more, but for this feature alone it is more than worth the money. The value of knowing exactly what your competition is doing is almost priceless. And honestly, the use of SEO Elite will teach you more about SEO than most SEO blogs on the internet. I read blogs for months before I purchased the program. Upon buying it, I spent days just running reports on sites, and it changed the way I saw SEO. No longer do you look at simplistic measures like link volume, but you get to see the specific details.

So go out and get links. And don’t depend on the advice of others unless they show you actual proof. Test stuff and try. Do some directory submissions and see if they help or not. Do article marketing and test that. Your confidence will increase when you actually get out there and build some links and prove to yourself what does and doesn’t work.

Tagged as: how to rank well, rank well, rank well in google

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