How To Increase Your SERP Rank

In the interest of helping you guys out, here's a case study of a client I picked up through my "Ask the SEOGuy Anything!" thread. I've withheld her website url and keywords at her request.

Situation: Site was a little over 6 years old, had been listed at number 14 for her main keyword for roughly 2 years. Hired several SEO firms and consultants through forums, craigslists, etc., was moved to number 14 and couldn't break the artificial ceiling. Was told the competition was too stiff, her budget ($xxx per month) wasn't going to be enough to compete. I told her it was. 

What I did:

Onpage: Nothing.

Offpage:

* Created 16 web 2.0 properties (blogs, squidoo, hubpages, etc). Adhering to the linkwheel structure of 1 link to previous property created, 1 link to main site. However, the link to the other property was chosen at random by the automated software as to not leave as obvious of a footprint.

* All web 2.0 properties were bookmarked and pinged. All RSS feeds were submitted to the relevant RSS feed directories.

* Identified authority sites in the niche through DMOZ, Y! Directory, BOTW. Emailed. I ended up with 3 good in content links from this.

* Submitted and syndicated 1 press release announcing re-launch of the service. SEO visibility chosen where applicable. Link had to remain intact with anchor text.

* Acquired 1 Wikipedia link on the relevant page to her niche.

* Submitted to 30 niche directories w/ automated software.

* Signed up for google alert pertaining to the topic. Did roughly 2 blog comments per day for 5 days.

* Created a resource site. Keyword rich domain, 5 pages of 1,000 word unique content. 1 link to the main site from this property. Bookmarked to get indexed.

* Spun those 5 articles to 60% uniqueness, randomly shortened to 70% of total length and submitted to 20 directories.

That's essentially all that was done. The site first bumped to number 22 after about 48 hours, then went to 11, then 8, then 5, now sits at 4 and has been for 2 days. We'll be top 3 with another week.

While these results aren't 100% typical, they aren't out of the ordinary. Hope this helps you guys out and puts you on the right track!

Fast Site Submit at BING.com

Just copy and paste below like. Do not forget to change your site.

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx siteMap=http://yoursite.blogspot.com/atom.xml

I'm not sure how fast it will get index, will keep posting the result.

Understand Google Ranking With 3 Words

OK, remember the following 3 words, because they sum up how Google works:

RELEVANCE, AUTHORITY and POPULARITY.

Google want to serve up results that are RELEVANT, so if you type in dog training, sites like...

dogtraining.com

Pages like...

howtotrainyourdog.com/dog-training.html

... and articles like...

"Dog Training - How To Train Your Dog In 3 Easy Steps"

... are probably relevant, especially if the page itself also contains the keywords.

But now, who can they trust? Google invented PageRank (PR), which basically tells Google how much they trust a site, on a scale from 0 to 10.

So in a purely two horse race between...

dogtraining1.com (PageRank 4)
dogtraining2.com (PageRank 6)

The higher PR site would win with Google. AUTHORITY.

But, but, but... Google also want to deliver pages that are POPULAR. People "vote" for a page by linking back to it (backlinks)!

So back to our horserace. If we found...

dogtraining1.com (PageRank 4 with 1,000 backlinks)
dogtraining2.com (PageRank 6 with 10 backlinks)

Google will think... "hmm... people seem to be voting for dogtraining1.com more... maybe we should put it before dogtraining2.com!)"

But then, spanner in the works... if the second site's 10 backlinks are RELEVANT (i.e. the linking text says "dog training") and carry AUTHORITY (i.e. CNN, BBC). and the first site's 1,000 backlinks don't have relevance or authority, the 10 backlinks could carry more weight!

Bottom line?

Everything... and I mean everything about Google's system can be summed up in the three words...

RELEVANCE, AUTHORITY and POPULARITY.

Most of the sites in the Top 10 for a popular keyword will usually have at least two of these working for them.

So a low PR site (low AUTHORITY) can outrank others if it can get more RELEVANCE and POPULARITY.

Sometimes a page can dominate because of the domain's AUTHORITY and POPULARITY, even if it is a little less RELEVANT.

And that's as much as I can say in 90 seconds.

Just remember, it's pretty much all about those three words: RELEVANCE, AUTHORITY and POPULARITY.

Google Basics - How does Google works?

When you sit on your computer and search Google, you will almost immediately show the list of results from around the web. Google will find pages that match your search, and define how the order of search results. How does Google works?

In the simplest terms, you could think of searching the web as looking in a very large book with an impressive index telling you exactly where everything is located. When you perform a Google search, our programs check our index to determine the most relevant search results to be returned ("served") to you.

The three key processes in delivering search results to you are:

Crawling: Does Google know about your site? Can we find it?	Learn more...
Indexing: Can Google index your site?	Learn more...
Serving: Does the site have good and useful content that is relevant to the user's search?	Learn more...

Crawling

Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index. We use a huge set of computers to fetch (or "crawl") billions of pages on the web. The program that does the fetching is called Googlebot (also known as a robot, bot, or spider). Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site. Google's crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these websites it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index. Google doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more frequently, and we keep the search side of our business separate from our revenue-generating AdWords service.

Indexing

Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.

Serving Result

When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site's PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content. In order for your site to rank well in search results pages, it's important to make sure that Google can crawl and index your site correctly. Our Webmaster Guidelines outline some best practices that can help you avoid common pitfalls and improve your site's ranking. Google's Related Searches, Spelling Suggestions, and Google Suggest features are designed to help users save time by displaying related terms, common misspellings, and popular queries. Like our google.com search results, the keywords used by these features are automatically generated by our web crawlers and search algorithms. We display these suggestions only when we think they might save the user time. If a site ranks well for a keyword, it's because we've algorithmically determined that its content is more relevant to the user's query.