Getting to the Top of Google – A Twitter Clinic

This Twitter Clinic was posted May 18th at 1:00 pm. Please follow me on Twitter so we can chat live during the clinics.

Today’s Twitter Clinic is about Getting to the top of Google’s search results – for common words – not your company name. To start, if

you tell people that you’re #1 on Google but are only #1 for your company name – that’s just rude and misleading. If you Google your company

name and are not number 1 – then you know you have a problem. Unless your name is something common like Vacations Tours, it should be a

no brainer. I guess the other exception is something like Smith Consultants where there are 90 nationwide. If that’s the case, pay attn.

A name like CrayMason Industries should be at the top within a week. I mean – who else is trying to be at the top for that keyword?

So, let’s start with your industry. Let’s go with lawnmowers, again. Your name is JackGrass Lawnmowers, but you know no one is searching for

JackGrass – so you want to be on the top for Lawnmowers. The first thing you need to do is figure out which keywords – exactly- that you

want to be on the top for. Lawnmowers might have too much competition to make it worth it. Keyword research will help narrow that by analyzing

what people search for exactly, how many people search for it per month and how many sites out there are optimized for that keyword.

A word like lawnmowers that has 16,000 searches/month and 300,000 sites already dedicated to it is not realistic – but maybe “lawn mower”

does. It doesn’t matter how to spell it correctly. What matters is what people are searching for. You need to optimize for the words people

actually search. Maybe yard mowers is a good term, maybe side-bagger lawn mowers is a better term – this is where keyword research comes in.

Let’s say that yard mowers has 3,000 searches/month but only 50 sites dedicated to that term – those are odds that we like a lot. What are

chances any of those sites are fully optimized for yard mowers. Some might be blogs, some might be actual product descriptions. To get to

the top and stay there – you need content. You need a page about yard mowers – specifically. Don’t ever use the word lawn mower, use yard

mower. Put it in the page title, the title tag, the meta description, the page Headline and in the first paragraph – early and often.

It doesn’t matter if you over-use it at this point. It doesn’t matter at all. You won’t know that till later, and that will actually be good

What you need to do is just write a whole 500 word page about yard mowers. And then one about yard mower accessories, and another about

yard mower cutting widths, and another about yard mower price reviews. Write good content using your keyword and link them to your home page

which is hopefully yardmower.com (not JackGrass). Put a link on your simple JackGrass.com page to yardmower.com and vice versa.

Now publish it and see where it lands in the search results. Wait a couple weeks (submitting to Google is a different twitter clinic)

Where ever it shows up, start analyzing the pages that come before you in the results. How dense is their keywords, how many incoming links

how many pages of quality content. (And keep adding content by the way. Honest, useful content). Now start tweaking everything little by

little. Go back and do more keyword research and see what other pages you can add to the site, what other good keywords. Find what people are

looking for and build quality pages of content to meet that search question. There aren’t tricks to this. Content is king. Keywords are 2nd

So the question is how do you get all this keyword research and analysis done by yourself? What tools exist to help make that happen. Well

Well, the best company out there with all these tools is SiteBuildIt They’ve got keyword research tools, keyword vertical

and horizontal search capabilities, they help narrow the keywords to help pick out the perfect domain name. They have linking tools,

they have tools to create webpages as easy as writing Word documents, tracking software, monetization tutorials, navigation forums

They’ve got photo uploaders, form builders, autoresponders, e-mail capture, hosting, ezine creators and much more (Go To SiteBuildit)

To get to the top of the search results for your niche, you really need ALL of SiteBuildit’s tools all in one place.

So the key to high results is picking the right keywords, tweaking the density, and providing great content – not just a sales page.