You own a website (or a blog), or maybe you have written an article to promote your website. Your goal is for your website or article to rank on the first page of Google search results for searches performed using your targeted keyword. If we are just focusing on Google while other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing do exist, it is simply because Google gets the very large majority of all the search traffic on the internet. Therefore, if you achieve a good Google search ranking, you will already be in business!
The following are the steps I recommend you take to increase the Google search ranking of your websites or articles:
Increase the Back Links to Your Website
Create as many back links as possible to your website from sites that are viewed as important or authority sites by Google. The importance of a site is determined among other things by its Google page rank, by the number of back links it has, and the importance of the sites where these back links originate. Note that the page rank of any site can be read from the Google toolbar which can easily be downloaded and installed on your browser. Here are the things you can do to generate back links to your website:
* You can insert the link to your website into an article that you submit to a popular article directory. * You can request the administrator of a popular site to add your link in exchange for placing their link into your site. * You can add your website or article link to contributions you make to popular internet forums, to comments you write in popular blogs, and you can also add your URL to social bookmarking websites * If you do not mind paying a relatively small monthly fee, you can use the services of article propagation companies who will spin your original article into multiple unique versions and submit them to website networks.
As far as articles are concerned, if you submit them to popular article directories which are viewed by Google as authority sites, they should normally get a good Google search engine ranking to start with which you can improve by implementing the following.
Optimize Your Keyword
Do your homework before selecting the keyword targeting your marketing niche, and that you will be using in your website or article. There are basically two parameters you have to check before you decide what keyword to use. The first one is competition. To determine keyword competition do a Google search for the candidate keyword placed between quotes. Normally, the keyword should be retained if the number of returned sites is below 5000. However, this does not mean that the keyword should be rejected if the number is larger than 5000. It simply means that the larger that number, the more optimization work you will have to do to achieve a first page Google search ranking.
You should also view and analyse the HTML source code of the sites and articles that come out on the first page of Google search results when your keyword is used to see what they are doing to rank so well and how you can outrank them. There are tools that you can use to get information on the number of links to these first page sites or articles, and on other useful parameters.
The second important parameter is the traffic (or number of searches per month) associated with your candidate keyword. If competition is low, but no one uses the keyword, there is no point in choosing it. You should target a resonably high keyword traffic per month for your candidate keyword. The free Google Keyword Tool can be used to determine the number of searches per month for a given keyword. At the end of the day, the selected keyword should represent a good compromise between the competition and traffic parameters.
Use Keyword Within Website and Article Content
If you can, you should use the keyword when you name your website and URL. You should also use it in the title, description, and meta tags of your website. Even if some say that nowadays Google does not look any more at meta tags for search results ranking, it will not hurt if you add your keyword to the meta tags as long as you do not exaggerate. The keyword should also appear in the content of your home page as well as the other pages. The same is true for articles. The keyword should appear in the title of your article, within the body, in the anchor text for your website link, and at the very end of the article. However, again do not exaggerate. Too many appearances of the keyword in your website pages or your articles could be viewed by Google as spamming, and your site or article could be penalized.
No one knows really exactly how the Google search ranking algorithm works. To maintain quality traffic Google always modifies it to stay a few steps ahead of those who try to manipulate the search rankings by dubious methods. However, if you apply the above recommendations you will certainly notice an improvement in your Google search ranking.
