Guest post by Ana Hoffman
I make it a habit to periodically check (maybe once in a couple of weeks or so) my Google Analytics account to see if I have any run-away posts that somehow ended up on the first page of Google without me doing anything but clicking the “Publish” button.
It’s always a nice bonus to see them pop up.
The first page of Google is always good, of course, but what’s even better? Sure, top Google ranking for that particular word.
Are you thinking what I am thinking?
If I made it on the first page without much effort, chances are I might land the first spot with just a little bit of tweaking.
Yesterday during my regular Google Analytics inspection, I did find a post in a good position to be moved up the Google ladder.
Right now it ranks #4. My objective is to get it top Google ranking, and these are the four steps I am going to use to get better search engine placement.
Step 1. Identify the Post Via Google Analytics
The first step is discovery.
I already went ahead of myself and explained what happens in this step: I find the posts that are already ranking in spots #2-#10. Every once in a while, I will consider a post with current rankings on the second search engine page if the keyword is worth ranking for.
Step 2. Size Up Your Competition
As I mentioned before, if my post landed on the first page without much effort on my part, the competition can’t be that bad.
But it’s always worth checking into it first.
The tool that I love using for this task and the rest of my keyword and market research is Market Samurai.
One of Market Samurai modules, appropriately called “SEO Competition”, let’s me spy on my competition for the specific keyword I am targeting.
Feel free to click on the image to enlarge
As you can see, I can easily check up on my top competitors’ standing with directories, their backlinks, PR, and on-page optimization (by the way, I teach everything I know about on and off-page optimization in my free 7 Steps to Complete Search Engine Domination report).
The most important factors I consider though are found under “PR Analysis” and “Anchor Text Analysis” you can see on the image above.
With those two queries I easily find out that my top competitor has 28 links to their post (compared to 6 links going to mine) and the PR for those links breaks down as follows:
PR 0 = 25 links
PR 2 = 1 link
PR 4 = 2 links
Not too intimidating at all.
Basically, all I need to do to outplay them is to get 3 PR 4 links, and I will try to get them all from dofollow blogs, to be on the safe side.
By the way, Market Samurai also tells me exactly where their links are coming from. So I can simply go to all the same pages and get the same links, plus find 1 additional link. Piece of cake.
Since this is not a very competitive niche, I might just do that to save myself some time.
Step 3. Improve Your On-Page Optimization
This one is easy as well. I already know that both my competition and I use the targeted keywords in our title, URL, description, and header tag.
All I can do here is to check with Scribe SEO plugin to see if I can tweak my meta information to make it any better.
And there sure is: Scribe SEO suggests that I place my keywords at the very beginning of both the title and the description.
Click on the image to enlarge
I can also add a few internal deep links with targeted keywords as my anchor text; that’s an easy way to add some additional links without having to hunt them down.
Step 4. Get The Links I Need
Since I now know exactly what I need to do as far as my one way link building to the post is concerned, it takes me just about 5 or so additional minutes to complete my post optimization.
Question: do you ever perform this kind of optimization for your blog? If so, do you do it differently?
Comment to show me that you’re alive!
Ana blogs at Traffic Generation Cafe, a blog that shares easy strategies for increasing blog traffic.
About Guest Author
I’ve just discovered the new SEO too-it’s Colibri and it’s awesome-it can track my website position on every Google,it also find my competition or even suggest it, monitors Facebook, Twitter mentions and backlinks to my website.Most functional-highly recommend!
Twitter: MMASouthAfrica
says:
Concept seems nice a easy, but where does on get the links from ?
MMA recently posted..Nelspruit Fight Night: NFN 5 – Pride
Google is really a very popular search engine of today’s time and it’s not always clear where they are basing their algorithm but one thing is for sure that we should abide with their guidelines in order to rank higher on SERP’s.
Regards,
John
Twitter: KunTo_Fitriadi
says:
wow, website ini sangat bermanfaat
These steps are indeed great ways to improve Google ranking. If you’re a starter, you might think it’s difficult to achieve this but if you’re determined then surely you will realize that it’s not that hard as you think.
As I am still developing my site, this is a good idea to push links and surely it’s a great post. Thanks
I enjoyed this post. The best part is the break down on how many and what caliber of back links it will take to beat your competition.
I went to Scribe but I could not register, I only saw the login link. I am really curious to know my sites seo score. What should I do to get my score?
Elvis Shrestha recently posted..Motorola Droid 3 Now Available From Verizon
Well honestly, I haven’t tried the Google Adwords I don’t know why since it’s free. Market Samurai, yes I had. But most people uses Google tools because it’s free.
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I think this is sufficient steps to get rank in google. But the thing is you should maintain that after getting good rank in google.
I have a lot of articles that are in page 1 for a particular keyword. If I would just build quality links for these keywords, I will rank higher unti I get the number 1 stop.
Nice post.I got an idea about blogging.Blogspot or WordPress Which is better?
Awesome guest post Ana!
I’m going to give your method a shot. :)
That is really great article,I am always looking for ways to write better quality articles.Thanks for this awesome ways about Google Ranking.
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Hi, Ana
I also noticed that some posts or articles appear sometimes higher without any efforts and I also start analyzing such events in order to find out the mechanisms or keywords that made it so popular.
I agree with your post. But good credit of your work is given if you have alread good page rank. Then better chance to index in the top the search engines. So work hard is needed.
Using the market samurai is a great advantages, but of course it is not cheap. therefore it is need a lot of consideration which tools that we want to get.
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Two thumbs up for this post Ana! This is just what I needed and I’m already excited to do it myself. And I think that I really must improve on number 2. By the way, I liked the image of the cat being reflected as lion in the mirror. That’s really from lame to fame. Ha ha!
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A small addendum to step 1:
If you verify your website on google webmaster tools, you’ll be able to check not only the clicks but the number of times your page showed up on google result pages – without getting a click!
After verifying your site, you’ll most likely have to wait a few days for this data to show up, it’ll be under “Your site on the web” > “Search queries”. You’ll see the number of impressions, clicks, CTR and average position on a keyword level. It’ll also show how these values changed in the last 30 days. You can filter your results and target clicks from selected countries.
So if you are number 7 for a given keyword on the first page of google but don’t get any clicks, you won’t see it in your analytics. However in webmaster tools you’ll see that the keyword had a decent number of imperssions, no clicks and that your average position is around 7 for that keyword.
You have identified a good keyword, time to move to step 2. :)
Peter recently posted..Your Options for Eye Surgery
looks like its gonna work alot for SEO, i will try it.. thanx for great article
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Looks pretty good mate. Ive been using the SEO Moz package but it got too expensive really so I might have a bash with this Market Samurai instead.
Hi Ana,
I also purchased Market Samurai but never used it in this way.
Your suggestions are incredible and I will follow these to defeat one of my competitor.
nazimwarriach recently posted..Enerfina Discount Voucher Code
Hi Naz
The great thing about Market Samurai is that you buy it for a one off payment.
Most SEO software charge a monthly fee for upgrades.
Market Samurai also has some great videos to show you how to use the software.
I use the Rank Tracker module to check the rankings of my various sites.
Keith Davis recently posted..Keep it short- keep it sharp
Hi Ana
Yes I do something similar but am probably not so methodical.
I use an attention grabbing title for my posts when I publish and when comments stop coming in I change it to a keyword rich SEO title.
Just bought Market Samurai so your advice on checking out competitors has come just right.
Scribe SEO plugin looks good. I’ll check it out.
Keith Davis recently posted..Keep it short- keep it sharp
Pretty basic advice here.. with the recent Panda Update, it’s really hard to determine what works or not anymore.. but the basics will always help: good content and spreading it.
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Well, after Panda what matters the most is quality. It’s as simple as that. Factors like how much time people spend on your site, bounce rate, etc. are taken in the consideration significantly – which is why you have to create eye-grabbing content and pages. Appropriate use of Multimedia is also important.
But yeah, the advice in this blog post is basic, but effective. It’s really about 1) jumping into the “right” niches 2) Publishing QUALITY optimized content (kw density, LSI kw’s etc.) 3) Quality backlinks. Speaking of backlinks, I’m yet to find a spammer who uses Scrapebox (building links directly to their money sites) and successfully ranking well on Google. Gone are the days when you could launch a scrapebox blast, fix metatags and boom, you’re on first page. You have to focus on quality – on-site as well as off-site.
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Fabulous post on SEO. You did a great job in explaining it in really simple terms. I am currently working on SEO, so I plan on implementing your methods. Can’t wait to see the results!
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useful information. Ranking in google matters most because if our site is at good rank then ultimately we get good no. of visitors.
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Very useful article for as i am new to marketing.Thanks for sharing
Twitter: BoyVeasley
says:
Hey Ana,
Thanks for the wonderful post!
I’m always looking for ways to boost my Search engine traffic, so this article was a big plus in my book. I will be refering back to this article for future refereance. Loved the article keep it up!
God bless,
William Veasley
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Hi Ana, thanks for this post. I got a lot of useful information out of it. I’m pretty new to the world of blogging, so my efforts to increase the page rank for my sites is a little bit more basic, I would say. At least as of now. I use the rank tracker tool offered by the SEOmoz pro edition to check the current rankings for certain keyword/property combinations. Based on that, I know what I have to backlink to and what keyword I have to use. I look for blogs that are highly-relevant and have decent Google PRs (3 or better, usually). Market Samurai sounds like a pretty useful tool to have, but if it isn’t free, I think I’m just as well off sticking with SEOmoz.
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Twitter: ditesco
says:
Useful and doable tips Ana. I say doable because sometimes people tend to complicate what can really be not. MS is a great tool and combined with SEO Scribe turbocharges a post with ease.
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Sometimes all your content needs is a few additional tweaks to improve the rankings. These are some great tips. Of course, having access to these tools helps a lot but there are steps that you can take without them.
The on-page and off-page optimization strategies are the most important ones to get traffic to your blog from search engines.
Even if you have the best content that you win you a nobel-prize, you will not get noticed without proper on and offpage SEO work.
Twitter: ftarnogol
says:
Niiice!!! You don’t usually run into these kind of posts. Explaining a complex subject such as SEO in a simple way.
Sadly, my blog’s budget cannot afford Market Samurai and a Scribe subscription, so I guess I’ll have to wait.
Thanks for the info, though!!!
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I find it too much of a hassle to do all these things, I’ve been having steadily increasing traffic the more I post and I have been doing well even without these strategies.
Very good tips though. I probably use 3 and 4 naturally.
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Thanks for the useful tips. I learnt heaps from this post and now to go check with my own rankings as to how to improve those not on page 1. Enjoyed the read.
Patricia Perth Australia
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Nice information regarding Google pagerank but now you must read about Facebook edge ranking. This concept will create new boom in SMO section for sure…
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