What to do and more importantly what NOT to do for a top ranking
So what do you do to make sure your site appears in the top ten rankings?
First I will tell you what NOT to do:
1. Do not submit your site to the Search Engines Search Engines will crawl your site if its mentioned / linked on other big sites which are crawled daily (I will show you how to get your site there a little later).
2. Do not submit to thousands of Directories or FFA pages Submitting your site to thousands of irrelevant directories will do you more harm than good. Its alright if you submit to a few niche directories related to your field. NEVER use mass submission software and submit to FFA (Free For All) link pages as your site will be seen as spammy by the Search Engines and you will be sandboxed and/or penalized.
3. Do not participate in linking schemes The Search Engines are getting smarter by the day and participating in Link schemes like Link Farms, Webrings, Link Co-ops etc. will only hurt your site.
4. Do not use content that is already being used by hundreds of other sites Posting duplicate content on your site will attract a duplicate content penalty from the Search Engines. Thousands of cookie cutter sites having the same articles posted on them does not benefit anybody. Instead write fresh content. Search Engines love fresh content.
5. Do not use shady/blackhat tactics I have actually seen very experienced webmasters use stupid techniques like creating doorway pages or adding a whole bunch of keywords into a paragraph of text and then changing its color to the same color as the website background (so that visitors cannot see it but the Search Engines can) and similar blackhat tricks. This is very dangerous and can get your website banned from a Search Engine. Read Google's guidelines about what not to do here - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
6. Do not stuff your site with keywords If you think your site is going to rank well because you have stuffed all your keywords into your main page, you have another think coming. Only use 2-3 keywords per page and make your website copy interesting to your readers first. Remember - people first, Search Engines later!
7. Do not use the same keyword for all your incoming links and don't point all your links to your homepage If all the incoming links to your site are having the same anchor text and all your links come in to just the homepage, it looks artificial to the SE's. Your incoming links should be spread across multiple keywords and across multiple pages of your site.
Now that we know what not to do, we can proceed to the 7 Steps that will get your site a top ten ranking but before I do that, I'll say a quick word about keywords. It is most important to do your keyword research BEFORE you start promoting your site. If you end up optimizing your site and getting links for the wrong keywords, all your efforts will be wasted and you will have to start over. So the foremost thing to do is use a tool to research your keywords. My favourite tool is the one from Wordtracker - freekeywords.wordtracker.com. I would also recommend using Good Keywords (goodkeywords.com) and The Dowser (thedowser.com).
Now, here are the 7 steps that will get you into the top ten on Google:
1. SEO: Search Engine Optimization - This is single the most important step you can take to increase your rankings. On page optimization like putting your keywords in the title, adding meta tags, h1, h2 tags, image alt text, robots.txt are simple things you can do yourself. Few webmasters realize the importance of SEO. Instead they lay more emphasis on promoting their website through PPC (pay per click) advertising, Blog posts etc. There are many free tools on the Internet which can help you with SEO. If you are not technically inclined, I would suggest hiring a SEO consultant or a SEO firm to do the job for you.
2. Exchanging Links - That's right. Exchanging links the old fashioned way still works. Most people would scoff at the idea but if you exchange links with the right websites, it can do wonders for your rankings. You should always exchange reciprocal links ONLY with sites which are related to your subject. Hundreds of link exchanges with irrelevant websites will do no good to your rankings - that's the catch - relevancy, and this is where most webmasters make a mistake.
3. Build quality content - When you write quality content, people will WANT to link to you. So ask yourself this - is the content I am writing /program I am developing going to be interesting enough for people to want to link/tag to? Not only will this get you hundreds of links the natural way but also keep people coming back to your site. A win-win situation for everybody
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