Crash Course In Getting A #1 Google Ranking
Jason DeVelvis

First, here’s the rundown of some of the terminology I’m going
to use in this article –

Inbound Links – Links coming into your site
Outbound Links – Links leaving your site
Cross Links – Links that you have “traded” with another site
(ie, they’ve got a link from their site to your and you’ve got
a link from your site to theirs)
PR (Page Ranking) – Google’s measure of how “important” your
site is

SEO Is Not Dead

Ok, now lets talk about what you really want to hear – how to
get those coveted 1-10 ranks for your keywords. Remember this -
SEO is not dead. In fact, it is very much alive and important.
The first thing to do in order to raise your site rank is
target specific keywords. I say specific, because you need to
target “keyphrases,” meaning more than one word keywords. Some
people use the words interchangeably (me included) so just
ignore one-word keywords altogether. You will waste your money
if you shoot for these, because chances are, there are other,
MUCH larger companies who already have you beat, and will
continue to have you beat unless you’ve got a bottomless
wallet.

Check Out Your Competition

Take this example, for instance, if you sell computers, you
should not try to optimize your site for the keyword “computer”
or “computers.” First, think about all of the businesses that do
ANYTHING with computers. Yeah, that’s a lot. They’ll all show up
if you search for “computer.” Now try to think of who would show
up at the top of that list. I’ll make it easy, it’s Apple, Dell,
Computer World, Computer Associates, IEEE, Computer History
Museum, Webopedia, ASUSTeK, WhatIs.com, and HP. I’m going to
go out on a limb here and say that I 99.9% guarantee you that
you’ll never get into that top 10 list. The HP link has almost
5,000 backlinks (discussed later) and a PR of 7/10. Good luck.

Then What Should I Do?

So what should you try to target? Lets re-visit your computer
store. What types do you sell? PCs, ok, what types of PCs?
Custom. Ok, that’s a little better, “Custom Computers” is still
a vague keyword, though. (How many people build custom
computers?) What kind of components do you use? Intel? AMD?
SoundBlaster? GeForce? There you go, that’s a little better –
“Custom GeForce Computers.” That returned 476k results instead
of our previous 633 million with “Computer.” Just a little bit
less competition.

I Want More

Want to go further? Forget what types you sell, go for what do
your customers want. What do they use your computers for?
Gaming? Try “Custom Gaming Computers” - There are 672,000
results here, but the #1 spot has a PR of 5/10 and only 41
backlinks. That shouldn’t be too hard to beat, we’ve just got
to know who is linking to them, and beat them at the backlink
game.

Oh yeah, before we move on to beating the pulp out of your
competition, don’t forget to SEO optimize your site for your
chosen keywords before spending any time on backlinks.
Otherwise, this next section won’t mean much.

But I Digress…

Ok, now that your site is thoroughly optimized, how do we find
out who their backlinks are? Well, you can do it by hand, or
you can purchase a VERY helpful tool called SEO Elite
(http://www.GetSEOElite.com) that will analyze all of the
backlinks to a site (and more). But, since you don’t have SEO
Elite yet, we’ll do it the long way.

First, go to toolbar.google.com and download the Google
toolbar, this will save you some time. Ok, now type in your
keywords – “Custom Gaming Computers.” The first link should be
overdrivepc.com (if it’s not, then someone may have already
read this column and risen above them!) click to go there. When
the page loads, go to your Google Toolbar, click on Options >
“More” Tab > Make sure the “Page Info” box is checked. Then,
click on the blue circle with the i in it. (This is the aptly
named: “Page Info”) It should drop down and allow you to select
“Backward Links,” choose it. Now you should be looking at a
Google search page again, but this one is different, it only
shows pages that link to overdrivepc.com. (Wow, that’s handy!)
At the time of this article, there are 41 pages that link to
the site, and you can view them all. Some are other pages in
the site, others are third parties.

Get Your Site Some Friends!

Follow each third party link and check out the page. Does it
have to do with your business? Would their visitors benefit
from coming to your site? (The answer is probably yes) If so,
email the webmaster - there should be an email address
somewhere on the site. Ask him or her if they would link to
your site. Be willing to trade links with them, or to pay for a
good link with a high PR. That reminds me – look just to the
left of the Page Info icon on your Google toolbar, and you
should see a green bar. That is the Page Rank of the page
you’re currently on. You want to target pages with higher page
ranks than your own, because for each of those sites that link
to yours, they effectively “give” you a little bit of their PR.
Kinda like in high school when the head of the cheerleading
squad flirted with the nerd in the hallway, she “gave” him more
popularity.

By the way, if you can manage to get a link from the #1 site
itself, do it!

Do this for all of these links you can, then move on to the #2
listing for your keywords. Then #3, and so on. Don’t get
discouraged if some webmasters don’t reply to you, it may take
an email or two. If they say no, thank them for their time and
move on. I try my best not to burn any bridges – you never know
when you’ll need to contact that webmaster again, and if he
remembers you were polite, that will make you look good.

Whew, Finally Done.

This is a very easy way to move up the Google SERPS, no
“expertise” required, just good old-fashioned hard work. It
will take some time for Google to re-index those pages and
realize that they have a link to you now. And it will take even
longer for your PR to go up (from what I hear, it’s been around
3-4 months since the last PR change [Today is 7/14/2005]) But
be patient, get links upon links, and keep adding great content
to your site, and you will jump up in the SERPS by leaps and
bounds.

To Your Success, and Your #1 Website!

About The Author: Jason a long time web developer and the owner
of Premier MicroSolutions, LLC. If you’re looking for more
articles about getting higher Search Engine rankings, go to
http://www.Content-Articles.com  and check out their great
directory of articles.

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