Method 1: Throw a Bunch of Pages at the Engines and Hope something Sticks
This is my method: I make a moderately large, user-friendly, easily navigable site. I write and write and write page after page of content. Each page targets a few keyword phrases, but very mildly (I don’t do anything more than make sure the major keyword phrase is in the title tag, a heading, and on the page a couple of times). I try to get some links in to the home page (maybe by writing some articles or asking for them). I make sure I have a lot of internal pages that people will want to link to (pictures, maybe a contest, really useful information). Then, I move on to the next site. I don’t check rankings, I don’t worry or obsess or change anything. Invariably, most of my pages move to number one or two for some keyword phrase, frequently even for a phrase I didn’t anticipate.
Basically, I write for the search engine user, and not for the search engine. Then, I hope that the obvious quality of the site garners me lots of natural links in and high search engine rankings. It takes a while these days, maybe up to a year, but it always works.
Method 2: Links
If you get a lot of links in to your site, your rankings will be higher, as long as the search engines think they are natural links (not bought strictly to increase ranking) so your home page should show up higher for whatever phrase you are targeting. A lot of these links should have some form of the phrase you are targeting as their anchor text (clickable part of the link). The actual number of links you need to get on the front page will vary depending on the competitiveness of the term. For a non-competitive term you may only need 1 link. For something like home mortgages you might need several thousand links. Also, if you have a prominent link to your site from the top site for any search term, you can probably count on a significant percentage of that pages traffic from that term.
Why can’t I just Hope for a Number 1 listing because my site deserves it?
Wouldn’t it be great if we could all get number 1 listings in the search engines for our desired keywords. Well, we can’t. Only one site can be number one, only 10 sites can be on the front page, and the search engines have to decide on these sites algorithmically (no person ever looks at any of the sites). Unfortunately, Google and Yahoo also have aging delays (called a sandbox) of some sort these days, so unless you can get some major links in to your site pretty quickly, expect to wait around for a while for any ranking at all. Just for arguments sake, let’s say, for John of John’s Scuba Diving in Kona, he puts his site up and has a number 1 on Google and Yahoo within weeks for his desired search term, scuba diving Kona. Remember how many people we said were probably searching on that and closely related terms a day? Between 5 and 15 I think I surmised. That’s not much traffic for John.
Any one page on your site is not going to list high for more than one or two search terms. Home pages especially are notoriously hard to get to rank for hardly anything other than company name and maybe one other term.
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