So you’d like to find your website in the top 10 on Google. Perhaps you’ve considered taking a chance on the guys that send those emails that promise you the number 1 position in the top search engines. Their pitch sounds good and maybe they can do it. Maybe there’s a secret recipe they know or perhaps they have connections at the Yahoo! and Google. The reality is while they may achieve a top ranking for your website it will be short lived and they are more likely to get your website kicked out of the search engine listings. The truth: no one can guarantee your website will achieve a top position in the search engines nor will anyone at any of the search engines give your website preferential treatment – unless you buy a paid listing. The best way to achieve top rankings in the search results is to earn it.

In an ideal world, the search engines would list only search results that were relevant to what you searched for. If you searched for Vermont maple syrup, you wouldn’t see websites talking about maple syrup from Canada or Maine (no offense meant). But that’s not what happens. Unfortunately, anytime there’s money to be made someone is going to find a way to manipulate the system to their advantage and this is very true when it comes to search engines. Intentional deception is part of the reason why we get search results that don’t really match what we searched for. Another reason is poor design and construction of web pages.

Search engines are genuinely trying to organize their search results based on relevancy. They update their algorithms – the software that analyzes all of the web pages they find - fairly often. Updates typically come in one of two forms – major overhauls and minor tweaks. These updates are designed to weed out those results that aren’t really relevant to what was searched for. While the search engines won’t tell us exactly how they determine what is relevant, they do give us some excellent guidelines to follow.

There are 4 major components to earning a top position in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

• Keywords are the words someone searches for. If you want your website to be found in the top 10 results you need to determine what keyword or keywords you want to be found under. If your website is about blue widgets then it’s probably a good bet you’d like to be found under “blue widgets” but you should also consider “blue widget”, “buy blue widgets”, “Barre blue widgets” and so on. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of different keyword combinations for each online business. The trick is to do the research to determine which keywords are most likely to earn you a top 10 position AND convert the traffic you earn into action (sell your product, make the phone ring, send you email).
• Once you’ve chosen your keywords then you need content that includes those keywords. If you’re targeting “buy blue widgets” then you should have a page that talks about buying blue widgets from your company. Talk about the ordering process, your customer service, and the quality of your widgets. But make sure you talk about “buy blue widgets”. Don’t try to stuff every keyword on one page. That will confuse the search engines.
• Talk to the folks who built your website. Make sure that your pages are quick to load and that they include a title, meta-keyword, and meta-description. These are HTML elements that are not visible on page (except the title). While the importance of these elements has diminished significantly over the past few years, they are still used by some search engines. Make sure the content of these elements matches the on page topic. If you’re page is about buying blue widgets then the title should be Buying Blue Widgets and the keywords might be something like “buying blue widgets, buy blue widgets”. You get the idea. Again, don’t stuff these tags with irrelevant keywords. Stay on topic.
• Now that you’ve built a well focused and keyword rich page, you need to get some votes from other websites that tell the search engines your page has value. These are otherwise known as links. When someone provides a link to your website they are in a sense saying they value the page they link to. But in order to get your keyword pages better position, you need to get links to them instead of just to your home page. And links need to come from a website that is on-topic or tangential to your topic. If you have a website that sells baby clothes, you don’t want links from a site that deals with travel – even if it is in Vermont – unless your page talks about Vermont made baby clothes. Stay within your topic area.

There is no magic bullet. Keyword rich, on topic, content combined with links is the basic recipe for achieving top positions within the search engines. There are, however, many more factors involved. When it comes to earning one of those coveted top 10 positions, you have to cover the basics first. Follow the recipe above. Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat and you should see a significant change in your rankings.