How to get a Top Ranking at Google, Yahoo, and MSN

Choosing your keyword phrases for your website is very important. I always pick a domain that contains keywords which have high traffic requests at the search engines. For example, I conduct searches of keyword phrases using keyword research tools link wordtracker or keyword discovery. There's no sense in picking a keyword phrase that isn't already yielding some significant traffic.

I normally use a site like networksolutions.com to research available domains and try various combinations of the keyword phrases until I find a suitable domain. Try to use your one or two keywords in various combinations and keep your domain short. Try it with hyphens if necessary until you find a good domain that is preferably a .com or a .net. I usually go with one of the 2 top level domains unless they aren't available.

Once you've decided on a domain for your site, the next important thing is to pepper your home page with your keyword phrase, but you must not overdo this. If the search engines sees a spammy page with no content and just keyword phrases spread about the page, you won't get a good ranking and you could get banned all together from the engines, so it's best to do things in moderation. Avoid keyword stuffing and "black hat" techniques. I've seen some strange techniques like using a font color that is the color of the backround! That will just get your into trouble so don't do it!

I recommend you use your Meta Keyword, Meta Description and Title tags and also put your keywords into a few of your image alt tags. Use them several times in your text body and use bold, italic, and underline tags around your keyword phrases. Sometimes I will use a header tag (h1) for the primary phrase if it looks ok on the page.

Obtaining links to your site is probably the most important thing you can do for your site besides a careful tweaking of your pages for your chosen keyword phrases. Two different websites which are nearly identical on the usage of the phrases will rank differently at the search engines when one of the sites has hundreds of links and other does not.

The keywords used in the anchor text of your backlinks from blogs, articles, and other pages will be the detemining factor in which site ranks higher for a given phrase. It's vital that you obtain links in different ways including one way links as well as reciprocal links. You can find submission services that will help you submit your articles to article directories and/or blog submission
services that will get your article into blogs.

Exchanging links has always been a somewhat tedious and boring undertaking and it also consumes alot of time. It really does take alot of links to get a top ranking on the first page of the search engine results. But this is where you want to be! The traffic that comes from being in the #1 spot for your phrase is great and it will make your sales ! In order to get there, you could need in the hundreds or even in the thousands of links depending on how competitive your keyword phrase is at Google, Yahoo, and MSN.