How to use Google tools to achieve top 10 placement for your website in only a few days.
It achieved top 10 placement 2 days after the site was launched! I do not intend for this Knol to become a gratuitous ad for the site but the site name is nhvtroofing.com and if you enter the terms we selected for search results you will see how we did it.
How did it happen? Simple logic applied to good planning and then do exactly what Google tell us to do.
A little review from my previous posts and i recommend you read them both seo for real estate websites part 1 - seo for real estate websites part 2 content
If you have read these pages just skip down to see the new info.
First the Keywords and phases were thought about prior to building the site.
This is a good idea to do even if you are not doing it for the search engines. You should be doing it for potential visitors to the site. If you understand what people are searching for and you have products services or useful information about those inquiries to the search engines, it makes sense you would become an authority for that search term.
Find the right keywords.
Make a list of words that summarize your website by what is its purpose. open notepad or word and start making a list. Enter each word or phrase on a separate line, you will see why later.
Questions to ask yourself and answer HONESTLY!
- Is the location of the business a factor?
- Will people who find the website need to be in a specific area if they do business with you? If yes add all towns, locales, or if in a region that is commonly used enter it also,( in this case the website I am referring to is located in a region called the Upper Valley and is located on the border of NH and VT and consists of 34 towns and villages that are all tied together in an economic zone.)
- What sets you apart from your competitors. Why buy from you? This will be the major source for unique content for your site.
- It could be you offer a service that is not commonly found, you have can offer a guaranty or better warranty for your work where others may not.
- since this should be unique to your business in the area you serve this will give you ample content that is also unique to the pages that are written about your products or services. This means your site if offering distinctive information, and will be considered an authority on the subject on that page.
- What products do you offer.
- separate by type and brand.
Next take the above list, and summarize in no more than a few phrases what your site is about.
use the format of location service or product type into a search phrase. and go to Google AdWords Keyword Tool
Some examples of what to put in:
- "NH roofers" state is of course location and roofers is the product type. This is a very broad search but will reveal what towns are searched for and other terms used when people search for NH roofers.
- then try "upper valley roofers"
- then try "upper valley metal roofers" "upper valley shingle roofers" "upper valley flat roofs" Now we are looking at location type product.
You will notice the exact phrase may not come up in the searches because this is a rural area but it is what we call the long tail searches. or keyword phrases that may not have a lot of volume but will get great results when clicked. Also this give you a list of keywords and phrases to work on improving with the ongoing SEO of the site.
Now click the Website content box and enter the domain name in our case nhvtroffing.com in the field.
This will show you what Google sees for keywords, this will also be found in the webmaster tools area and i will discuss its use below.
As you can see, the keywords found on the site match very well with the suggested keywords we saw in the searches. this means the content of the site matches the intent of our purpose of the site. So the fundamentals are good.
Second Site Structure
Now that we know the keywords, and have the outline of them from above, use them to name the pages and directories in your site.
Why? Because if the name of the page matches the search terms, and the title, description, keywords tags, and content of the page match the search term, then logicaly the page can be relied on to be relevant to the search. This is what all search engines want.
For example say you have a flat roof. and after some research you find the Duro-Last roof is the best choice for you since it is considered one of the best flat roofing systems in the world, now you want to find a company that installs Duro-Last in the area you live in, so you enter "duro-last roofing contractor nh" and BAM there is nhvtroofing.com #1. but look at the page name nhvtroofing.com/Duro-Last-Roofing.php and see the highlighted keywords, and you see that Google likes the page because it really fits the search.
What you must do to get in Google and achieve top10 placement in as little as a few days!
Now lets say you have done the above and have finished your site using keywords as part of your site structure and directories, for example you are in retail and sell shirts, you would have a directory of shirts/brandname.php as the web page name. You are ready for the next crucial step.
If you are the web site developer follow these steps, if you are the website owner and are looking to hire a developer you should be a little coy and ask if he will do these steps for you in the cost of the site. If he does not know about this then bail and find another person to do the site for you.
If you don't have an account in Google you need to set it up and add the following.
- go to Google home or if there click on business solutions add the following to your account.
- Analytics add this to your Google account.
- Then setup your account and follow the steps to add urchin tracker to your site. This will give you not only stats on the site but you can use google's optimize and also compare your site to others in the industry for important factors like time on page, how many pages viewed. You can see what search terms were used to find your site and what search engine brought them there. Lot of great information and is how Google sees your site. So if you are missing something you will know it here.
Webmaster Central add Webmaster tools and sign up your site.
- you will need to add a page or add a meta tag to your site to verify that the site belongs to you.
- follow the steps below. PAY ATTENTION this needs to be done right!
BELOW IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU CAN DO TO GET ON GOOGLE IN ONLY A FEW DAYS.
The sitemap is the key. Setting up the sitemap is critical. use one of the many sitemap tools to generate and add the sitemap.xml to Google. I build my sites in php and for many use a database. For these dynamic pages I use my own sitemap generation code customized for each site.
I have used this one for my smaller static sites and it is easy to use. sitemapdoc
All the sitemap generators will give each page by default the same priority. This needs to be changed to reflect the real importance of each page.
Here is a good rule of thumb for how to rank the pages.
home 1.0
general info pages like about us, contact us or any other forms 0.5
local information related to your business 0.7
product pages 0.8
and landing pages , those like the duro-last example above 0.9
Page change rate
Some sites change daily weekly or monthly. There is a change field in the sitemap use it appropriately. This will not really affect the rate a page is indexed, but will give Google an idea of how often the page changes. If the page does not really change it sees the discrepancy it could cost you.
Resubmit your sitemap after adding new pages to your site or after any significant changes to pages in your site.
There is a date stamp in the sitemap if you don't update it then google will see the sitemap as stale. Remember Google loves new stuff!
TAKE YOUR TIME AND REVIEW EACH PAGE BEFORE YOU SUBMIT YOUR SITEMAP!
Review the site map for errors, like duplicated home page, etc. The sitemapdoc program will show your errors and allow you to correct them and assign priority ranks to the pages.
!!! REVIEW YOUR SITE PAGE BY PAGE FOR:
- Correct meta tags.
- This can be a disaster if to many pages meta tags are not correct and do not match the content of the page. If you are like most of us we create the site a use the main page as a template to create the other pages. One of the common mistakes I have made is to forget to change the title description and keywords for the page. Also add this to all pages you will see why below.
- Fix and errors in the code.
- use W3C validator do not use any other validator this is the industry standard. Fix all errors on every page and add logo and link code to you site.
With all the above done it is now time to submit your sitemap.xml in the webmaster tools area.
It will take a few hours to a day for the sitemap to get uploaded Keep checking its status every few hours.
After the sitemap is shown on the pages a done your site is now indexed, and you can start searching for the site by the domain name and see if it shows up. then try some of your keyword phrases and see what happens.
But If your sitemap reports errors, fix them quickly and resubmit it.
This is the honey moon. Google loves new stuff. if you don't start getting links to your site from others related to your industry, then you will see the site fall in the rankings quickly. you have about a month for to get links happening or you may a huge drop.
What your are now doing is working on the Page Rank of the site. to see Page Rank of a site you need the Google Tool Bar in your browser.
Page Rank is achieved by 2 things.
Clicks to your site by other users of the Google Tool bar that allow Google to gather stats of theory browsing habits, and by how may other sites like to your site, in the same industry.
Lots of back links from sites not related to your site's industry can hurt you, so be careful on the next steps.
A good way to get great back links:
- Vender websites. have your suppliers link to you as an authorize dealer.
- Blogs if your industry has a blog site go to it and join. write an article about your industry and add links to your site in the article. don't just link to the home page link to the pages you ranked as a 0.9 - 0.7 in your sitemap.
- submit your sitemap to Yahoo! just add your link to your sitemap.xml file. where it says Submit Site Feed
- pay the $250.00 to get listed in the YAHOO! Directory.
- submit your site to the ODP Open Directory Project. This can take while since it is a Human edited directory by volunteers that review each submission .First Navigate to the location that fits your site the best and then click the suggest URl link at the top of the page to add your site to the directory. It is free so no excuse to not do it.( Remember to place this code in all your pages if search bots do not have this director they may ignore the page description
- )
- do some searches for your industry and find sites that have a good page rank and offer to link to them if they will link with you. Remember the page rank or PR is in the Google tool bar.
- Google and others get suspicious of sites that are submitted to hundreds of small search engines and link farms (sites that offer little or no content just links to other sites ) doing this can get you thrown out just as fast as you got in.
- Have patience. This is a long ongoing process. you should add links and blog articles every month.
- You need to change the content or add new pages to your site every month.
- When you do remember to update your sitemap and reload it in Google. Some sites change daily weekly or monthly. There is a change field in the sitemap use it appropriately.
There are lots of other details but these are the fundamentals of what has to be done to achieve
WHAT GOOGLE WANTS!
And if Google gets what it wants so will you.
If you have questions or are looking for help send me an email or visit my site for SEO services.
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