Ranking in the SERPs - Part 3 - Tips & Techniques

We’ve talked about deciding on which keywords to target in the SERPs and we’ve talked about influential factors in SERPs rankings. So what I’d like to do now is discuss how to put all of this information together in order to help everyone succeed in ranking in the SERPs.

Keyword Selection Tips
As I’ve said earlier, targeting the proper keyword is crucial when trying to rank in the SERPs. Select a keyword with too much competition and you will find yourself pages deep in the results, but select a keyword with too few searches per month and all of your SERPs domination with be for not. In terms of keyword research and selection I recommend the following tools in order for research:

SEOBook’s Keyword Suggestion Tool
Adwords Keyword Tool
Overture Keyword Selector
WordTracker

The only reason I put WordTracker at the bottom is that it’s a paid service and I feel that the other three do a more than adequate job of researching keyword traffic. If you have any other suggestions, please leave a comment.

Using the Influential Factors
In my last post in this series, I talked about a few factors that play a large roll in your SERPs position, but shied away from discussing particular techniques on how to use the information. So here’s some information on how to apply that information to your own SEO quest:

Title Tags – As I discussed in my last post, title tags can be easily modified (for a WordPress blog) using a number of different plugins. The one that I suggest however is the All in One SEO pack as it tweaks title tags, meta keywords and more. If you don’t have it installed yet, get on it! When it comes to SERPs rankings, make sure to put your keyword in the index page’s title and have it as a part of the title of some of your blog posts as well.

Anchor Text – There are plenty of ways to get people to link to your site while forcing (asking) them to use a specific anchor text. As I said John Chow was famous for not only his money making abilities, but also his “Review me for a link” series where he has hundreds of people linking to his blog with specific anchor texts in exchange for a linkback. Be careful with a program like this though, Google was less than happy with John and banned him for it.

In addition to that idea, consider running a contest or giveaway. I ran a contest where I offered a palm pilot in exchange for a review of my blog using specific anchor text and was able to generate a good bunch of links using the Internet Entrepreneur anchor.

Another idea is to propose link exchanges with some of your fellow bloggers. I currently exchange links with Matt Huggins, Blogging Fingers, Enkay, and Random Jabber and in many cases they have been able to either use my name or specific anchor text. Remember it never hurts to ask.

Lastly, when all else fails, Text-Link-Ads can be used to purchase links on other related sites using whatever anchor text you desire. I discourage this though as it’s fairly easy to build links without spending money.

Relevance Linking Sites
It’s true it’s hard to control who links to your website and how relevant they are to your topic, however the links that you can control are important to your SERPs ranking. Because of this, when asking for links make sure the sites you are getting linked from are relevant quality sites, not new 5 post blogs with duplicate content. In addition the more relevant quality links your build, the less important the non-relevant links will be. So go out there and start linking!

Relevant External Links
This is the easiest to control and can be mixed in with the last two concepts I talked about. By exchanging links with quality websites, you are not only receiving a link from the quality website, but also linking to a quality website and in terms of SERPs ranking this will be quite helpful. Also remember, even if another site doesn’t want to exchange links or can’t be contacted, you can still link to them in good faith and spread some link love.

I hope this post has summed everything up nicely and taught you a bit more about how to rank in the SERPs. Currently I find myself number 7 in the SERPs for Internet Entrepreneur and in the coming months hope to be in the top 3.

If you have any questions or would like me to write more about SERPs information, please feel free to contact me.

Good luck!

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