Getting your Website a number 1 ranking at Google is easy -- when you know how! My site has been ranked number 1 or thereabouts for the past year at Google for the keywords "expired domain names" and I did it with less than 24 hours' work! This article gives you a step by step description of how I achieved it, and a blueprint that shows how you can do it too.
When I first developed the site, my target was less ambitious that top ranking. I'd read all the articles describing how much work it was to achieve a high ranking, how you had to have pages and pages of content, and how you had to have hundreds of inbound links to your site. So I didn't follow all the rules, and my initial target was just to get onto the first page of search results for my selected keywords. I though this positioning would be good enough to generate significant traffic to my site.
However, when my site reached the number 2 position after about 3 months, I decided to do a little more optimization and go for number 1. Sure enough, the following month my site was there in the top spot! My ranking does occasionally slip to 2 or 3, but it's usually back up to number 1 again the following month, and if it slips for the phrase "expired domain names", it's often up at number 1 for "expired domain" at the same time.
Of course, things change fast in the search engine world, and this article is definitely tempting fate. By the time you read this, my site may have disappeared from view altogether! But in the meantime, here's what I did -- and what you should try - to get top ranking.
Step 1 - Keywords
Task: Choose your keywords Time Needed: 2 hours
This is of course the most important step of all! It would be easy to get a number 1 ranking for the keywords, "Red Hot Domain Names free expired domain name lists", but it would be entirely useless as nobody would ever search on those keywords. On the other hand, lots of people search on the keywords "mp3 downloads", but the traffic generated would be wasted on my site, as the visitors wouldn't find what they were looking for, and would depart very quickly indeed!
The trick is therefore to select a search phrase that is commonly used and will bring significant traffic, but which is also specifically relevant to your site. In selecting keywords, ask yourself this question:
"Is my site really what people are looking for when they type these words?"
My own site is dedicated to providing free expired domain name lists, so some obvious search phrases were "domain names", "expired domain names", and "expired domain name lists". But which of these would bring the most traffic?
Of course, you might want to go for a number one ranking for a number of different key phrases for different pages on the site, but let's take this one step at a time.
Keyword Popularity
Fortunately there are tools to help you find the most commonly used search phrases. The first is the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool (previously the Goto suggestion tool). This allows you to enter a search term, and returns a list of suggested related search terms and how many times each search term was searched on at Overture last month.
Entering "Domain Names" threw up a lot more suggestions, including "unclaimed domain names", "unregistered domain names" and so on. By far the highest number of searches was performed on the term "domain names", but it seemed clear to me that it would be better to go for the more highly targeted traffic that would come from one of the phrases specifically related to expired domain names -- and this phrase was indeed the most used of these.
At the time that I completed this exercise, the Search Term Suggestion Tool gave separate statistics for singular and plural words, for example "expired domain" and "expired domains", but unfortunately it no longer does so. This is, however, important at Google (and indeed at Overture) as the two phrases return different search results, as Websites are ranked differently for each. However, the next tool we'll look at does make this important distinction.
Keyword Competition
The other important factor in the choice of keyword is the "competition" for that keyword from other Websites. It is more difficult to achieve the number one ranking, or even a first page ranking, if there are 10,000 (rather than 100) other Web pages indexed on your chosen keywords. The tool at http://www.WordTracker.com takes this factor into account and also differentiates between singular and plural words in search terms.
There is a free trial version that you're free to use as often as you like, which uses statistics from Alta Vista. There's also a full version priced from around $6 for a one day subscription. The full version looks at the statistics from most major search engines and allows you to analyse more keywords. As well as suggesting alternative keywords and giving you the number of searches performed on each, this tool looks at the number of competing Web pages for the keywords and calculates a "Keyword Effectiveness Indicator" (KEI). The KEI gives a high rating to popular keywords with few competing Web pages, and a low rating to unpopular keywords with many competing Web pages. It is therefore useful for identifying the keywords that should be the most effective in generating traffic.
However, remember that it is equally important to select the keywords most relevant to your site, as it is to choose frequently-searched words with little competition. It's pointless being listed number 1 in the search results if users fail to click through to your site because it doesn't seem relevant to their needs.
