1) Steal Your Competitors’ Keywords
- Look at the keywords they use in their title tags.
- Look at the keywords they use to link to their “money pages”.
- Some webmasters are dumb enough to include their money keywords in their meta keywords tags. Take a look at these but keep in mind that smart SEO people won’t do this. In fact, just to mess with wannabe SEO’s they might actually put bad keywords in the meta keywords tags to get others to use them.
If stealing keywords sounds shady, its only because I used the word “steal” instead of “learn” to grab your attention. You should always learn about your competitors; you can bet that they’ll try to steal..err learn your keywords too.
2) Fix Canonical URL Issues
If you can access your site by typing “site.com” and “www.site.com”, Google will see that as two different sites with the exact same content and that can hurt you a lot. To fix this create a file called .htaccess with these three lines and put it in the root folder of your site:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.site\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.site.com/$1 [R=301,L]
WARNING: unless you know what you’re doing, have someone else do this. All servers are configured differently and you don’t want to screw-up your .htaccess file.
3) Pay Attention to Your MozRank
SEOmoz has a tool called LinkScape that calculates your MozRank. MozRank is a great metric that evaluates the QUALITY of your incoming links. (Most link assessment tools only focus on quantity). If you have more links than your competitors but they’re ranking above you, you should compare your MozRank to theirs; maybe your competitor has fewer links but they are BETTER than yours.
If your MozRank is higher, you have more links than them, and they still rank above you, then you probably have an issue with the lack of keywords in the anchor texts of your incoming links.
4) Get a Double Listing
A double listing (or indented listing) can sky-rocket your click-through-rate (CTR)! How you can get a double listing?
- You need two pages of your site on the same page of Google results. For example, let’s say you have a page A and page B. Page A ranks #4 on Google for “plant seeds” and Page B ranks #15 for the same keyword.
- You need to take page B from position 15 (second page of Google) to position 10 (first page of Google) so pages A and B are on the first page of Google.
- Perform this Google search to find out what 2 pages Google finds most relevant to a given keyword: site:yoursite.com [keyword].
- Now that you know what 2 pages are the most relevant for that keyword, use the SEO Rank Checker Tool to find out the Google rankings for those pages.
- Optimize pages A and B for your keyword. Link to page B from page A and vice versa using the keyword you want to rank for in the anchor text of the links.
- Get some keyword-rich links from external sites to pages A and B.
- Presto! Your listing will look like this one:
5) Use Google Webmaster Tools
You really have no excuse not to use this amazing tool. These are some of the things your can do with it:
- Submit a sitemap of your site so Google knows what pages they should index.
- Tell Google what is the canonical URL you want to use (site.com or www.site.com).
- Detect issues with duplicate title tags and meta descriptions.
- See a list of URLs restricted by robots.txt.
- Detect crawlability issues.
- Find 404 error pages.
- See the most common keywords people find your site through.
- Get a list of links pointing to your site.
- Tell Google how they should index your images.
6) Create a Google Sitemap
Now that you’re using Google Webmaster, create a sitemap using this tool: GSiteCrawler.
7) Use Google to Get Keyword Suggestions
Start typing your main keyword in the Google search box and get ideas for keywords. For a more detailed keyword research use the Google Keyword Tool.
8) Learn the 4 Truths about the QUALITY of Links
- Links from authority sites (e.g. CNN) are worth more than links from average sites (e.g. your nephews’ videogame blog).
- Links from related sites are worth more than links from unrelated sites.
- Links with your keyword in the anchor text are worth more that links that say “click here” or “read more”.
- Link QUALITY is way more important than link QUANTITY.
9) What To Do If You Ever Get Penalized By Google
First off, avoid spammy black-hat tactics so this never happens. But, if you’ve been a bad boy/girl, this is what you should do:
- Find out why it happened. Read Google Webmaster Guidelines and find out what you’ve done wrong.
- Fix it.
- Ask Google to reconsider your site. Admit to everything and don’t pretend you didn’t know what you were doing. Promise that you won’t do it again.
- Don’t do it again!
