It truly is possible to build a website that Google, Bing, Yahoo and the other smaller search engines are all going to want to rank high. They will want to rank it high even when it doesn’t have very many links at all. If you build a truly great authoritative site according to these rules, you will see exactly what I mean. Your site is going to rank very easily compared to how much work it would normally take you.
Here are three things that you can focus on that work well for me time and time again.
1) The content on the website has to impress visitors enough that they actually want to share it. You can impress them in one or more of the following ways:
- Impress them with the quality of the information you are sharing. To do that you need to deliver content that nobody (or few people) are sharing publicly.
- Impress them with how professional your site looks. – If your site looks professional at first glance then visitors are going to be predisposed to liking other things about you and your website. (wish I had that skill)
- Impress them with the way you deliver the benefits to them. Some people are really witty or really funny. They just have a way with words. Those people will gain followers and friends just because of their personality.
Which Of Those Areas Will You Focus On?
You don’t necessarily have to focus on just one of those areas. You could do a little bit of each. The combined effect has to be enough to make people really like what they have found. It is entirely possible to accomplish that by being great in one area and completely lacking in all others. Think about it.
The reason why you need to make a big positive impression on people is because that is how websites earn natural publicity. As the natural publicity gains momentum, you will see your rankings increase along with it. Your rankings will increase because there will be more mentions of your website (your brand) online. There will be more social media sharing and social media links. Plus there will be more natural links appearing to your site that pass link juice.
You can still get a site to rank without impressing anyone at all. There are almost always exceptions. But, you will shoot yourself in the foot if your website leaves people with a negative impression about the quality of it. One sure way to get a site demoted right now is to get enough people to block the site from their personalized search results using Google Chrome. If you get enough people doing that, you will find your site getting demoted.
The increasing trend in Google search rankings is to try to mimic what a person’s real perception of your website is. So, without impressing your visitors in some positive way, you are not going to have a website that search engines really want to rank high, especially Google.
2) Build as much content into each page as a person, who is really interested in that material, would want to find.
When someone is doing research using search engines, whether he is looking for some very detailed information or just seeking general information to help make a purchase decision, that person is looking for a great source of info.
If someone is looking for an explanation about a specific topic, they are going to want the full explanation. Those people will be willing to read thousands of words of content in order to get a full and thorough understanding of the answer to that question or the solution to whatever problem they need help with.
At some point you will be reading an article online and come across a blogger saying that readers don’t like to read more than 300 words or something like that. I am sure if you really looked hard you could find some situations where that would be true. In most cases, it is not going to be true. Your visitors generally want you to be thorough.
Google really likes it when you are thorough. So be thorough.
Every article you write for your blog should be as thorough as it needs to be (within reason) to properly explain your viewpoint to whoever is reading the post. When people are reading an explanation they are interested in, they generally aren’t going to get bored reading about it. They crave more information; not less. So give it to them as plain spoken as you can, but give them the whole picture to the best of your ability.
3) Build a website that is truly useful for the target audience it is intended to serve.
Google representatives have said all along that webmasters should focus on building great websites and leave it to Google to figure out how to write algorithms that find those sites and rank them higher. Maybe you drink that cool aid and maybe you don’t.
There are certain things that happen with a website that is truly beneficial to its target audience that really don’t happen with websites that are not so helpful. The truly helpful websites end up getting mentioned on and linked to from places where it is impossible to manually place a link. They get mentioned by real experts within that industry. They get mentioned by real people on their Facebook pages. They get mentioned in people’s emails when one person is emailing another with some advice. These are things that can’t be bought or created intentionally by a webmaster who wants to fake it. You can only fake so much. And those little differences between the fakers and non-fakers are the differences that will make the site a winner over the long run.
I have learned that the hard way after banging out countless websites that would perform well for a short time while ultimately failing because they weren’t really serving the target audience like they should have. And believe it or not, trying to serve your target audience actually makes building a successful website a lot easier.
Ranking High Is Much Easier When You Do Those 3 Things
I guarantee you that you will find SEO ten times easier if you focus on doing those three things. Those components are core parts of my business model for every new site I build. You get better at it with practice. Then getting rankings gets easier and easier. Trust me on that one.
