SEO: What Makes The Real Difference When You Want To Be At The Top Of Page 1

The internet has become so competitive that getting to the top of page 1 is a real challenge, even for the SEO experts. So what sets the websites apart that are on page 1 of the search engines?

Well of course, there's a question that comes before that. Which search terms are you targeting? Imagine for example that you are selling cars. The phrase "cars for sale" attracts a very high number of queries, and the companies who have researched properly will target this phrase. It will therefore be a reasonably long process to optimise your site to the point where it gets on the front page.

Being more targeted will make a difference. For example, the phrase "convertible cars for sale" has very much lower search volume and has less competition. So you need to decide whether to appeal to a smaller more targeted market that is looking for what you have OR whether to try and appeal to a larger market which is looking for something much less specific than you have. The general advice of course is to target a niche on the web, because niches get big enough to support your business.

So you've decided on the terms you want to optimise for. Now you need to optimise your site so that the meta data reflects your key words, and the content on the page has keywords in the text, headline, sub headings, titles on pictures and graphics etc. Each page needs to be linked to the others using keywords in the link text.

Importantly, for SEO you need your domain name to be keyword rich. Lots of people miss this, but if you're working on an existing site, create a new domain name (including key words) and point the old one at it. It's important that the site resides on the new domain, so don't just forward it. Do it the other way around.

When you've done all this you're going to need links. Type your key phrases into one of the top search engines, and see who's in the top positions. Then go to linkpopularity.com and find out how many links they have to their site (just type the web site name in and it will tell you).

This is where you will find a huge difference depending on the competition for your niche. In some cases you will find 150,000 relevant links to the site, and in others you might find 200. This is telling you how many links you will need to capture the top spot. If you do the same thing with the sites at the bottom of page 1 you will find out how many links you will need to get on to the page.

We're answering the question in the title of this article now. Whilst all of these steps are important, the single most important SEO factor in deciding who is at the top is the number and quality of links from external sites. This is how the search engines gauge the popularity and relevance of the site, to the search terms. If you're getting lots of links from relevant sites with good page rank, then the search engines like your site and your SEO is working.

How do you get these SEO links? There are a number of ways. You can submit link requests to directories and you can visit blogs and comment on posts, both of which involve placing a link to your site. You can also write press releases which will be published around the internet on multiple sites, and you can write articles which will be published as well. In all cases it's important that the link is hidden behind some link text i.e. the link is one or more of your key words, with your website url as a hyperlink behind the text.

And then... just keep going. You can't have too many links for SEO, and you need to keep building them because all your competitors are doing it.

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