Boost a site up a search engine list.....how?

Question

ive just had a salesman in my office offering to boost our website to the top of google.co.uk above the big boys in our industry when sombody searches for one of our keywords, its is not a sponsored link through google. How do they do it?

Answer 1

Hi

I've got lots of experience in this section. If you search with web marketing my web site is on page one with this phrase. Or if you search with car credit, creditplus is number 1 in google.co.uk

I think Scott mentioned important things that you need to do. For off site seo which is link building Here is the list with top 12 link building tips that I highly recommend you to use when starting to build your links.

1. Directory Submission

Getting listed in dirs is good for you, you get a lot of backlinks. I am posting here only high quality, free, human reviewed, PR6+ directories only ( BTW I checked the PR of the directories I am providing with Google Toolbar and I have to say that there is a big difference in their PR since the last update. I have seen many directories that have fallen from PR6 to PR0, I suppose they have used some black seo to get promoted and finally they lost their PR). The good thing about these dirs is that if you get your site listed you will get lots of traffic. The bad thing is that the review proccess of your site often is more than 3 months. Here is the list I use:

http://dir.yahoo.com/ PR 8

http://www.dmoz.org PR8

http://www.stpt.com/ PR 8

http://www.open-site.org PR 8

http://www.femina.com PR 7

http://www.portal.eatonweb.com PR 7

http://www.bloggernity.com PR 6

http://www.podcastzoom.com/ PR 6

http://www.bloguniverse.com PR 6

http://www.gogreece.com PR 6

http://www.lanic.utexas.edu PR 6

http://www.sacentral.sa.gov.au/site/page... PR 6

http://www.worldhot.com/ PR 6

http://www.elib.org/ PR 6

http://www.ezilon.com/ PR 6

http://www.christiansunite.com/ PR 6

http://www.aardvark.co.za PR 6

http://www.nzs.com/ PR 6

http://www.info-listings.com/ PR 6

http://findingblog.com/ PR 6

http://www.iguide.co.il/ PR 6

Of course there are more good high PR directories but I will leave the search for them to you. You can use google to find some, but the lists that come on first page results shows the old PR of the directories. So in my view these 21 dirs that I have posted here a worth to submit to them. Don’t get mad if you are not listed after 3 months from submission. Your time will come, don’t give up!

2. Link Exchange with other webmasters

This is also good way to get backlinks. When contacting other webmasters write in personalized way. Tell them why you want to exchange links with them, introduce your site to them, tell them more about your site. Try to exchange links with only high quality sites with higher PR. You may find good partners to exchange links, the best way is contacting them in personal, or you may use some forums to find link exchange requests, and last but not least you may use some automated link exchange sites. Here are some of them:

http://www.build-reciprocal-links.com/ PR 6

http://www.linkdiary.com/ PR 5

http://www.telalinks.com/ PR 5

http://www.linkexchanged.com/ PR 5

http://www.belinked.info/ PR 5

http://www.linkwizard.net/ PR 4

Using these automated link exchange sites will also boost your backlinks and you will get many relevant links to your site. You can find much more sites like these but to be honest I think these ones will do a perfect job. You can always ask google about something like: ‘free automated link exchange sites’, ‘free reciprocal programs’, ‘free link building programs’ and some more search terms like these.

If you want first to check the pagerank of the site you will be exchanging links with I recommend you to use:

http://www.digpagerank.com/ - In this site you can check the PR of a page or site in over 700 google datacenters

3. Article Submissions

Maybe I won’t tell you something new but try to write good quality unique articles and post them to the best free article directories. This is one of the best way to do 2 things for your site: first get a lot of backlinks from the articles and second get a lot of traffic I hope you know that you have to put your keywords that you compete for in the anchor text which is very very important for higher results in the SE’s.

http://ezinearticles.com/ PR 6

http://www.articleclick.com/ PR 6

http://www.1888articles.com/ PR 5

http://www.articlesbase.com/ PR 4

http://www.talkinmince.com/ PR 4

http://www.article-hut.com/ PR 4

http://www.articleuniversity.com/ PR 4

http://www.articlefeeder.com/ PR 4

http://thephantomwriters.com/ PR 4

http://www.article99.com/ PR 4

http://www.instantcashflow.org/free-arti... PR 4

This list is only 11 sites long but if your article gets listed in all of them expect more than 1000 visitors to come to your site from the link in the article.

4. Press Release Submission

This method is something like writing articles and post them almost everywhere. In fact using this tactic you have to write a press release about your site or a page from your site. The process is the same. You have to submit the press release to good press release distribution sites. Below is the list of the ones that I am using.

http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/ PR 6

http://www.pr.com/press-releases/ PR 6

http://www.free-press-release-center.inf... PR 6

http://www.clickpress.com PR 6

http://www.pressbox.co.uk PR 6

http://www.prleap.com PR 6

http://www.1888pressrelease.com/ PR 5

http://ecommwire.com/ PR 5

http://www.przoom.com/ PR 5

http://www.newswiretoday.com/ PR 5

http://www.free-press-release.com PR 5

http://www.pressreleasenetwork.com PR 5

http://www.prfree.com/ PR 5

Hope these 13 sites will help you to get much traffic. If you submit regularly to them and your site or articles gets listed there expect to get at least 200 unique visitors daily.

5. Social Networking / Social Group Sites

Social networking sites are very useful these days not only to get links but also huge traffic. Participating in social group / networking sites are proving to give boost to your traffic these days. Here is my list:

www.myspace.com PR 8

http://spaces.live.com/ PR 8

http://www.livejournal.com/ PR 8

http://www.orkut.com/ PR 8

http://www.friendster.com/ PR 7

http://www.linkedin.com/ PR 7

http://360.yahoo.com/ PR 7

These are one of the best social group sites. There are a lot more but I think these are enough, they are high quality and have a high PR ( 7+). They are perfect for getting good backlicks to your site.

6. Getting link from .org , .gov and .edu sites

The education, organization and government sites are considered much more valued sites and links coming from those sites are valuable. You need to search and find such sites.

Do a simple search on Google with this search term:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%…G=S...

You may use another perfect search term special for edu blogs:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q…22&...

With this string you will get all .edu blogs that allow posting comments and do not require to be logged in. Hope you find this string perfect. You can experiment with it for all kind of domains, it’s up to you. Make blog comments and put links in them, make sure your comment is genuine and not spam. You have to read the whole topic and find something to comment on the topic, job is done. After doing some comments maybe in a week you will see in Google index that you have links from .edu domain or .gov

7. Social Bookmarking Site Submission

This is the newest technique to get quality backlinks to your site. These days people like to share their interests in social bookmarking sites. Posting your interesting article to such sites will boost your traffic and give you thousands of visitors. But it is not so easy as it sounds - you have to write really good article, or news or something very very interesting to get your article on first page of these sites.

Don’t waste your time or money submitting to sites that don’t receive traffic! Use this list of sites for the best social bookmarking results

http://www.netscape.com/ PR 9

http://www.digg.com/ PR 8

http://del.icio.us/ PR 8

http://www.furl.net/ PR 8

http://technorati.com/ PR 8

http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/ PR 7

http://reddit.com/ PR 7

http://www.fark.com/ PR 7

http://www.43things.com PR 7

http://www.mister-wong.de/ PR 7

http://de.lirio.us/ PR 7

http://www.newsvine.com/ PR 7

http://www.blogmarks.net/ PR 6

http://ma.gnolia.com/ PR 7

http://www.simpy.com/ PR 7

http://www.shoutwire.com PR 6

http://www.spurl.net/ PR 6

http://bluedot.us/ PR 6

http://www.blinkbits.com/ PR 6

http://www.blinklist.com/ PR 6

http://netvouz.com/ PR 6

http://www.trailfire.com/ PR 6

http://www.backflip.com/ PR 6

8. Forum posts

This is the way I like best for getting backlinks. Find forums that are in your niche and create account with them. In userpage write your homepage and you have a backlink. DO a search on Google and you will see how many forums are out there, you will be amazed. Do this process many many times and you will have one way links pointing to your site.You can combine this with forum posts and this way you will get your signature shown much more times. Personally to me it doesn’t matter that forums have nofollow tags, Google still counts that as a link to you.

9. Blog comments

Another great way of letting the world know about your site. This method is similar to forum comments, again most of the blogs comments have nofollow tags but Google still count this as a backlink. Here is another good way to get a backlink from a blog’s main page:

Find blogs that have “top comments” or “recent comments” plugins, this way if you are top commentator you will get your link on the main page of a blog. Do this with blogs that fall into your category. I didn’t knew that but a friend told me this method and I must say that I see good results for now.

10. Get a link on a mainpage of PR 9 sites

This one you probably do not know but I am going to share it. Spare some time, do a search for sites that have PR 9 and have a donation section in their mainpage. I am sure there are at least 20 such sites. In th

Answer 2

Well, since none of us were at the meeting the response would depend entirely on the tactics they described.  I've determined that only about 10-15% of those claiming to be an "SEO" actually know what they're doing.  And of large non-search-focused organizations (e.g. phone company, yellow-pages/phone directory, and others) probably even less of them know what they're doing.

In addition, you should consider which keywords they are claiming to do this for.  A search for a 4-word keyword may put you #1 on Google easily, but nobody would search for it.

In general this is what works, and what doesn't.  

works:

WORKS: KEYWORD RESEARCH

determination of keywords that will generate desired activity at a level sufficient to matter.  Shorter phrases are harder to optimize for, but have more volume.  Use common sense for this -- what would YOU search for if you were seeking out a site like the one you're running.

WORKS: CONTENT CREATION

Having high quality content on your site is important - but for different reasons than you might expect.  One of the most important reasons is that you want to obtain links to your site from external, high authority sites.  Those sites will probably never link to a "sales page" - so creation of helpful information documents (think "handouts") that are link-worthy is a good first step...which leads me to...

WORKS: LINK BUILDING with RELEVANT sites

After you have high quality content you can then work to obtain inbound links from authority sites.  Authority sites tend to be less sales-y and more educational.  University or community resource sites are good examples.  The pages that you will encourage links to should NOT be sales pages.  The links to them will raise your entire domain name in rank.

DOES NOT WORK:  Sneaky tricks meant to fool the search engines such as displaying different content to the engines than to humans, hiding special text or silly things like that.

DOES NOT WORK: Building hundreds of links from sites that are not authoritative or relevant to your site.  This is why "link farms" don't work.

DOES NOT WORK: Doing SEO work entirely on your own site.  Only 25-35% of your rank is influenced by "on-site" changes (some say smaller) - the rest is related to links.

DOES NOT WORK: Saying they "know someone at Google" or have a special relationship with them.

Some other things to consider.

Google has employed something called "personalized search" which means that they will adjust the search ranks based on your recent searches and other settings in your google login.  Even if you are not logged in to Google they will soon begin to alter your search engine results pages (SERPS) based on recent activity.  

So if you recently searched for "Jaguar" after doing a previous search for "Large Cats" you'd see a different result than if you did the same "Jaguar" search after searching for "European Cars"

The a-ha moment there is that the concept of "#1 in Google" has all but disappeared - now that you cannot depend on it being the same from person to person.

SEO is not dead as a result - quite the contrary.  Truly expert SEO professionals know that one can still optimize within areas of intent by the users.  It's more complex, but still possible.

To avoid the complexities, the best plan is to create amazing content for your site and to become an authority in your domain of expertese - invite links - and not try (or let anyone else try) any tricks.

ps: links below:  Mattcutts is a Google Employee, see links below.

Answer 3

How do they do it? They take your money and not much happens; unless by luck.

Have a look at our new website, a genuine attempt to help others design and promote their website, prompted by our own learning curve developing http://www.shareworld.co.uk

The beginners guide has been started at http://www.ds32.com

Answer 4

Generic keyword seaches which are localized to a particular city, state, country does elevate substantially one's website on major search engines, particularly on Google and Yahoo.  And often the mere keywords query is sufficient without regards to placement of relevant outside links to maintain high PRs.

Here's a helpful article which will improve anyone's website ranking.

The most effective way to advertise on the Internet is

to first set up a website and publish its domain name

on major search directories such as Google.com,

Yahoo.com [at http://www.google.com/addurl/?...... and

MSN.com since 85% of Internet shoppers rely on these

search directories to provide them with goods and

services. In a sense, these search directories are a

very large Internet Yellow Pages.

Nevertheless, should your website or opening webpage

fail to contain "generic" keywords, then anyone using

such "generic" queries will not be able to discover

your website. Your domain name [URL] of your website,

in a sense, will be invisible, undiscoverable.

You may want to consider some simple algorithms which,

when observed and committed in designing of a website

with placement of various critical metatags that can

surely achieve a high search engine presence and

increase Internet traffic to your website. These

metatag strategies work well with published webpages

at Google and Yahoo.

Design: Should you create an extensive Flash-based

website, make sure to fill-in the property entries

such as the Title, Description and Keywords. Failing

to do so, leaves no hard HTML or ALT resource that can

be readily indexed by search robots. Also consider the

Internet audience and their incoming setup. For

example, if they are on analog/dialup, Flash webpages

take too long to load up and therefore analog users

will likely lose interest and discontinue entering the

Flash site. On the other hand, anyone on hi-speed DSL

lines, will welcome Flash pages which load quickly. So

before designing a pure Flash websitge, ask the simple

question, "Who's my end user - is he on dialup or

DSL?" And if you had to choose between these two users

for maximum marketability, then select analog users

since 80% of most resident users are still analog

Internet subscribers and pure HTML designed webpages

is best for them.

A non-Flash-based website which relies on hard text,

is far easier to be indexed by search robots. Limit

the use of stylized text saved as .gifs since as a

graphic, they are not indexable by search robots.

Avoid use of frames since any number of search robots

are unable to properly classify textual material.

Placement of Metatags:

A ranking or search order does take place with Google

and Yahoo and it begins with the "Title" metag which

should consist of no more than 65 characters separated

by commas. The "Title" should describe in generic

terms, the goods and services, followed by a location

from which the resource is located, i.e., city, state.

The placement of a domain name which is not generic

within the "Title" is not appropriate, unless your

domain name is a major recognizable brand name.

The second metatag is the "Description" which is

usually 25-30 words to form a complete sentence which

best describes one's goods and services.

And the very last category - "Keywords" are also

somewhat limited to 15-16 words which can be plural

and compound in nature. Again, avoid multiple entries

which could be mistaken as "spamdexed entries" which

is defined as the loading, and submission of

repetitive words into a particular metatag category.

"Spamdexing" when discovered on a webpage and reported

to Google's spamreport.com can result in the

elimination of your website from their search

directory.

Here's an example of a very highly-placed website on

Google.com: Begin with the very "generic" search query

"sandwiches downtown los angeles," taking note to not

abbreviate Los Angeles to "LA" and of course, leave

out the parentheses ("). It will bring up some 2.4

million+ search results. Check out where "Nazos.net"

is ranked. It's ranked No. 1!

Again, Nazos.net's high web presence was achieved by

proper web design and placement of relevant metatags

according to Google's publication guidelines.

Good luck!

Answer 5

They can influence your position but they cannot guarantee a first page listing.

Without writing an essay on this subject keyword specific content and quality inbound links will boost your ranking.

You can tell if they are legitimate by asking them to guarantee a 1st page listing. If they say yes then avoid them like the plague.

An SEO company cannot guarantee what Google controls. Also if every other company employs an SEO company they cannot guarantee success especially if the other companies have a bigger budget.

Having said that SEO works a treat if done correctly. If you need any help go to http://www.4psmarketing.com/seomanagemen...