Getting to the top of Search Engines

Before reading about Getting to the top of Search Engines, I recommend you read the On-Page and Off-Site SEO articles first...now that you have those under your belt, let's begin.

If your goal is to rank well ("well" typically considered as the first page of results) for competitive keywords in the SERPs, then it isn't enough to just do your on-page work and get some links. Why? Because if the term is competitive, then there are others out there (possible a lot of them) doing the same thing. So to get to the top, you'll need to examine what they are doing and one-up them. This can be a tedious venture, but one that, in the end, will be quite rewarding.

So let's begin. We'll imagine we've started a company that offers Internet marketing. We've decided that our keywords are "Internet marketing", and we've done the necessary on-page SEO work. We came to this keyphrase because it accurately describes what we offer, and it seems to be what our target audience searches for when looking for this service.

I now like to go to Yahoo's Keyword Selector Tool to get the Overture score (1) for the term. You can see from the screenshot that "Internet marketing" returns a score of 311,598, which is high. This means that in May of 2006, there were 311,598 searches for the term "internet marketing" on the Overture network. With so many people looking for this, you can bet there's competition! Wherever there's a market, there's a number of people vying for business.

My next step is to go take a look at what I'm up against. So I go to Google and search for our phrase. A lot of people like to look at the number of results at this point (see a screenshot of that here) but this information really isn't very useful because it's returning every page it knows about where the words "Internet" and "marketing" appear, whether in context, together, or not. So let's move on.

In our results page let's look at the last site listed (by the time you read this it probably has changed, so I won't mention the site, just use the figures, but realize they will be different for you). I'll copy the link to the last page in the results and I'm going to investigate its Link Popularity (2) by using Encentra's Link Popularity tool. I get the following results: Google: 26,300; MSN Search: 472,395; Yahoo!: 985,000. This tells me how many links each search engine is aware of.

Since I know how important inbound links are to a site, I can make a pretty good guess on how many links I will need to rank well for this term, but the story doesn't end here. The numbers above tell us how many TOTAL links this site has going into it, regardless of anchor text, and tells us nothing at all about the sites containing these links.

To be as diligent as possible, I want to know a lot more than I do so far. I want to know how many of these links use our keywords in the anchor text, what the title of the page is that has each of these links, and the URL's containing each link. Since this is a competitive term with thousands of links, I won't go through that for our example, but it's important to understand why this information is necessary. Then you can go forward and do what you need to do for your own site.

Remember, anchor text tells search engines what those pages believe is the subject matter of the target page, and this is (mostly) how we get search engine results. If I find that the above example has 8,000 links leading to it with the phrase "Internet Marketing" in the anchor text, then it's a pretty good estimation that in order for me to rank above this site (and thus on the first page of results) I'll need over 8,000 links with the keyphrase in the anchor text leading to my site.

The 8,000 number now gives me something to work towards. But there are some warnings. The first is that search engines are quite smart, they know that if a site suddently gets 8,000 new links to it then something may be fishy. So, we need to build these up gradually so it appears natural (or, as often heard on the net, organic).

The second thing we need to concern ourselves with is the anchor text. If every single link leading to our site has the exact same anchor text, seach engines may also perceive this to be strange (because people do not always describe the same thing with the same words). So we'll need to vary our anchor text a bit, but always keeping our keyphrase somewhere in there.

Now we set to work building links with what we learned in the Off-Site SEO article here, building as many links as possible over time. But we add the information garnered by examining the links to our competitor to our arsonal.

Beyond regular link building we are going to start contacting the sites that link to our competitors and ask them (very politely) to link to us. Since inbound links from sites that have titles that are the same as our keywords are considered better than those with other words, we'll try and track down sites with these keywords and ask them (politely again) to link to us. If necessary, we could build other sites with these keywords in the titles, place them on a different server, give them unique content, and link these to our site. While this last technique may be considered a tad on the "black hat" side, it is one utilized by search engine optimization companies. It's an easy way to get links if you can afford the expense.

We can also try some advertising, buying links on sites. If you decide to use this option, be careful which sites you select to buy links on. Search engines, Google especially, have found ways to determine if some links were purchased, and generally do not pass much benefit of these on to sites (and it may even hurt your site if done poorly, see the Off-Site SEO article for more info).

Overall, the plan on how to get to the first page of search engine results is simple, in practise, though, it can be very difficult for competitive keywords. The idea is to examine your competition, and better them.