How to Get a Top Ranking in Google

By James Anderson

Everybody wants to get their website in the top spot on Google or Yahoo! Many SEO companies promise to get you to this coveted top spot for a fee, but nobody can really guarantee this. If they do make a promise be vary careful to check out the reputation of the company before signing up. There are no special secrets to getting the top position, but rather knowing what to do. Anyone with some knowledge of SEO techniques can optimize their own website and improve the chance of getting a high position in the search engines. There is a lot of learning to do before you can master all the techniques but if you are in a hurry that’s when the SEO companies can help.

Having one-way back links to your site is no longer enough. You also need to use proper anchor tags on your site catered for your main keywords. For example, if you are selling web tools and use the click-able text “products” to take a user to the products page, this would be less effective. It is more appropriate to use “web tools” for the click-able text, which is part of the chosen keywords. For example, see the site Sandanco.com and click on the web tools anchor text.

Although most search engines no longer use keywords as part of their ranking algorithm, the keywords are still very important to help users find what they are looking for and steer them to your site. Most users tend to pick one word phrase in their key word list. Although this still works, but to get more relevant traffic to your site you should use a keyword phrase to describe what you are selling to drive visitors to your site. For example, simply using “tools” is too generic and would bring up millions of hits. However, if you use “web tools” this would narrow down the search area to drive the visitors that type “web tools” to your site. It is no use having a visitor coming to your site that is looking for machine tools when you are selling software. This is called targeted traffic. To get targeted traffic you need to use targeted keywords.

Once you have made a list of keywords for your site, you next have to find out how many people are actually typing these keywords into the search engine to find the appropriate web sites. There are many free online keyword tools on the net to help you perform this research. You would of course want to pick the keywords most often used in the search to find website with like yours.

The next step is to get more one-way links to your website. Don’t waste time getting hooked on with link-farms that have no relevant content and only pages with links to other pages. Some search engines will penalize you for this while others would just ignore these links and not count them in their ranking. Remember, the people writing the code for the ranking algorithm know most of the tricks in the book that people try to use to fool the search engine.

The right way to get back-links is to actually use strategic links from another site that has something in common with your site. Most often, this can be done by simply writing to the Webmaster from another site to ask if they could place a link to your site. Sometimes they may say no and other times they will agree to place a link to your site. This is more effective then a reciprocal link exchange. A reciprocal link has less value because it is a two-way link. Each website owner agrees to exchange his/her link to the other site.

If you are in a hurry to get to a top ten position, you can increase your back links by using a paid one-way link campaign. There are many companies that offer this service and you should do your homework before you part with your money. Nevertheless, this is the fastest way to increase your back-links and improve your rankings in the search engines. Remember, it is more important to the search engines on where your link in coming from rather then how many links you have. There are many factors that determine how you can get your website to the top position in Google or Yahoo. This article is not intended to be a complete guide on how to get a top ten position but to point out some common methods to get there.