How to get to number 1 in Google

17 Jun 2010

Your website should be a portal to your expert services, world-leading products and outstanding customer service. With its unique and engaging content, it must stand out amongst the buzz of ho-hum websites.

What's next? How come the search engines have not awarded your website with the number 1 ranking it deserves?

Below I briefly explain some effective techniques that can help get the attention of the search engines and on your way to a high website ranking.

Modern search engines work on the principle of measuring links between web-pages. The most important links are those from other websites to your website.

These links are known an inbound links. Examples include links to your website pages from news websites, forums, blogs or product review sites. Google follows these links and assigns a measure of popularity and trust to your website based on these referral links. It can be considered as a voting system, with other websites voting for your website content by their links.


Kick-Start your Rankings

In order to kick-start the link building process you need to adopt the role of publicist and journalist on behalf of your website. You can do this by building links on other websites back to your website. Ideally these links are build by others on your behalf, such as by web-masters, bloggers and customers. But in the initial stages it is important to take on this role yourself to get some link building momentum.

Here are some of our top link building techniques.

Article Publishing & Syndication

Publish articles to article directories and syndicate them widely. In exchange for your content, article directories provide you with links and traffic back to your website. We recommend the following article directories:

Video Directories

There are hundreds of video directories. In the description of your video, link back to your website or relevant product/service page. As we discuss later in this article, links from youtube are nofollow and not useful in the link building process.

Blogs

Get links from high profile bloggers. These links are high quality as they are editoral in nature. Apply the same approach to online journalists on news sites. To find relevant blogs, use one of the many available blog search engines. For example:

Directory Listings

Authoritative Global Directories
  • dir.yahoo.com - Yahoo Directory
  • dmoz.org - the open directory project. The largest manually audited listing online.
Best of Australian Directories

Strategic Partnerships & Industry Bodies

Develop partnerships with relevant businesses that provide complementary services and link between your websites. Request a dedicated page or section on your partner’s website, so you are able to add significant content to the linking website. This approach gives you the flexibility to embed links within anchor text and relevant content. Allow your partner to do the same on your website.

Local Link Building

Request inclusion on websites located in the same geographic area as you (suburb, town, city, country).

Some Important Technical Gotchas

1. Quality Links

Not all links are created equal. A link from a website that is well known, trusted and highly relevant to your website content is worth many times the value of a link from a new, irrelevant website. As such focus on building quality, relevant links back to your website.

2. Dofollow / NoFollow Links

Links from high profile sites such as facebook, youtube, wikipedia, twitter and linkedin do not provide any direct search engine ranking benefit. To counter spam links, these sites have set external links from their websites to be nofollow. This setting instructs search engines to ignore nofollow links. To find out if a link from a particular site is nofollow/dofollow, download the free plugin for Mozilla Firefox – nodofollow.


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