Top Search Engine Rankings are Easy!

Well okay, we have to admit that it isn’t easy to achieve top search engine rankings, but it may be easier than you think. The key is to understand contextual linking and to tailor your keyword phrases a bit. Greed is the enemy of page rank – everyone in the mortgage industry may want to be one of the top five in Google search for mortgages, but you’re facing some stiff competition considering how many millions of mortgage lenders there are. The competition can be fierce and expensive.

The key to a top search engine ranking is diversifying your keywords a bit to cover several niche markets within the overall market. For instance, you may not be able to be number one for “mortgages,” but you could certainly be in the top five for “Arizona FHA loans,” “Pennsylvania home equity loans,” or “best CA mortgage rates” if you focus on 3-5 word phrases (the long tail) rather than one catch-all keyword like “mortgages.”

Hitting Once vs. Hitting Many Times
The results can be phenomenal. In this case, most people are searching for a mortgage lender that can work with them specifically and can address their situation, so most searchers are going to narrow the focus of their search according to their own needs, which could be by state, type of loan, bank affiliation, etc. If you’ve done your homework and can come up with several combinations of words or phrases to combine with the word “mortgage,” you will soon find yourself with top search engine ranking on the first page of Google searches for many niche searches. If you can’t be in the top five for “mortgages”, wouldn’t it be great to be in the top five for twenty different kinds of specific mortgage or mortgage services in twenty different states?

Contextual Links can Get you Top Search Engine Rankings
Contextual links on your site will help you rank well with the search engines if you have these links set up for each of the exact 3-5 keyword phrases that you are trying to rank high on search pages. Remember, contextual links are considered Primary Text by the search engines. Placing your contextual links “above the fold,” or in the top half (or better yet, top quarter) of each page they appear on strengthens their importance for search engine purposes.

An even better use of contextual links is to make sure your exact keyword phrases are used as links back to your site from other websites. There are several ways to achieve this, including reciprocal links on sites that are relevant to your own site but not competitive with it (for mortgages, you might want links from sites that offer real estate services, credit cards or credit counseling, home improvement information, payment calculators….the variations are endless). Better yet, have your keyword phrases appear within relevant articles or blog posts. Readers are sure to notice these links and these kinds of dynamic links will definitely get the attention of search engines.

To maintain your top search engine ranking in niche areas, periodically update, rewrite and add to the information and links you have for each of your 3-5 keyword phrases. If you’ve ranked on the first search page for twenty different phrases, you can rotate through these and update five or so phrases each month when you’re in a time crunch and can’t work on all twenty. The beauty of this is that, even if a few of your phrases slip down in the rankings, you still have other phrases that are performing well and keeping you in the top search engine rankings. Done right, a variety of specific, niche keyword phrases will keep you in the top of the search engine rankings with great consistency.

Wikipedia.org defines a metasearch engine as a metasearch
engine is a search engine that sends user requests to
several other search engines and returns the results from
each one. They allow users to enter their search criteria
only one time and access several search engines
simultaneously.

Sounds intresting does’n it? Since you are conducting a
search on more than one search engine you signifiantly
increase the likelyhood of finding the page that you are
looking for without a lot of effort. Most metasearch engines
will also display their search results according to
relevance, eliminating duplicated results and showing the
top results at the top of the page.

Now that you know how to search smarter do a test using
eighter www.yahoo.com or www.google.com and then doing the
same search on a metasearch engine such as www.laplounge.com

About the Author
Winny Divalos is the founder of http://www.laplounge.com a meta-search engine.

More and more, I’ve been seeing people wondering if they’ve lost traffic on Google because they were detected to be selling paid links. However, Google’s generally never penalized sites for link selling. If spotted, in most cases all Google would do is prevent links from a site or pages in a site from passing PageRank. Now that’s changing. If you sell links, Google might indeed penalize your site plus drop the PageRank score that shows for it.

The Stanford Daily is a good example of this. In my Time For Google To Give Up The Fight Against Paid Links? post from earlier this year, I looked at how the student newspaper of Stanford University was continuing to sell links despite widespread attention to its actions and without any penalty being imposed by Google:

The Stanford Daily is NOT banned from Google. The site’s homepage still has a PR9 score. Nothing indicates that the Stanford Daily’s links aren’t passing ranking juice, not in the ways that Google could control, if it wanted. Maybe they aren’t, but how would most people know? How would other publishers thinking of doing the same know? Certainly not from reading the paper’s rate card (PDF), where there’s nothing said about text links relating to search engines. The only thing said is the price: $350 per month.

Last week, I noticed the Stanford Daily had dropped from when I wrote the above in April to PR7 today. That’s a huge drop that has no apparent reason to happen. Some others were also reporting PageRank drops. So I pinged Google, and they confirmed that PageRank scores are being lowered for some sites that sell links.

In addition, Google said that some sites that are selling links may indeed end up being dropped from its search engine or have penalties attached to prevent them from ranking well.

The debate over paid links has continued since Paid Links War II was kicked off in April (that Time For Google To Give Up The Fight Against Paid Links? explains how it got started the previous war). Most of the arguments I’ve seen continue to feel like they’ve been made and made again. I remain of these views:

• It’s Google’s search engine. They have every right to say that if you sell links, they might penalize you.
   
• Google is not telling people what to do with their sites, which is a popular argument point. Google is telling people what to do if they are concerned about doing better in Google. Don’t want to be harmed in Google? Don’t sell links.
   
• Don’t care about Google? Sell links all you want.
   
• Despite Google’s policy and even this latest action, they’ll never catch all the paid links. It’s part of the reason I’d like to see them back off the paid links war and instead work out other ways to determine if a link deserves credit, paid or not.
   
• I don’t want people who innocently sell links to be harmed.

The latter point came up recently when David Airey worried that paid links had caused him to drop in rankings and that he didn’t realize they were a problem. I commented that it was hard to believe he didn’t realize this given all the SEO knowledge he demonstrated. But the concern is well taken. What if someone sells links and gets their PageRank dropped or traffic reduced under this new policy by Google?

Google says that most people hit with a PageRank decrease will likely notice this, and then they can request a review. Eventually, it may be something flagged within the Google Webmaster Central system.

Why not just change the PageRank meter to something like a red bar, to warn those potentially buying links from getting them from a nabbed site. That would be helpful from a consumer point of view, preventing people from wasting their money.

Google says that by doing this, it would be easy for anyone to detect which sites have not had their paid links discounted — and since they don’t want people to buy links, that would work against their efforts. For the same reason, Google is only decreasing the PageRank for a subset of the sites they actually know about.

I can understand that — plus, while I suppose an innocent person might buy links for direct traffic, it is again hard to think they’d buy links for search ranking purposes without understanding that Google might discount these and so they might be wasting their money.

As for the sites themselves, I still feel like if there’s going to be a penalty, tell the site that.

Google stressed, by the way, that the current set of PageRank decreases is not assigned completely automatically; the majority of these decreases happened after a human review. That should help prevent false matches from happening so easily.

Back to David Airey, Matt Cutts commented about paid links as an issue with his drop in rankings, when asking if they were gone and not coming back. David put in a reinclusion request and today notes his rankings are returning.

Overall, the move takes Google into a new era of attacking paid links, allowing it more precise weapons than it has had in the past. For example, both the Stanford Daily and New Scientist are among several prominent sites that sell links. Google has not really been able to penalize such sites as that would hurt core relevancy. People expect them to show up.

By using PageRank decreases (something Google first experimented with in the SearchKing case in 2002), Google can hurt the perceived value of buying links from a particular site without harming core relevancy.

In contrast, if you’re a smaller site not deemed as important to relevancy, a harsher punishment of a ranking penalty may be dealt out (the Text Link Ads site is an example of this).

Ironically, despite the move, Google itself will still allow paid links to be promoted in another way — through its own ads. For example, here’s an AdSense unit I just saw recently on our own site:

See the “Get A PR6 .Edu backlink!” ad? Expect those firing back at Google over the selling links issue to poke at the hypocrisy here. Of course, the search quality team and the ad sales sides are completely different parts of the Google house. And more important to the site owner, you can argue the points all you want, but they won’t help reverse a Google ban. If Google traffic is important to you, don’t sell links.