Search Engines - Back To Basics

I want to share a secret with you about getting top positions in search engines.

There is no secret to getting top positions in search engines!

Don't tell the gurus - they won't believe you.

But it's true. I have been building web sites now since 1999 and one of my very first ventures online was to write an eBook about getting top search engine positions. It was so long ago that I don't even have the material I wrote anymore.

It still works though, because I haven't really changed the way I do things, yet I still get most of my pages listed in the top ten of the top search engines, including the mighty Google.

Let's take a trip around "Search Town".

First stop is "Backlink Boulevard". This place is full of street vendors called gurus, who tell you that you need tons of backlinks from "authority sites". An entire industry has been created , of people and firms dedicated to getting backlinks for their clients. These little sweat shops, hidden away in Backlinks Boulevard, house indivisuals tied to their computers for up to 23 hours a day, employing child labour to work automated machines loaded with specialist backlink software, that the search masters, cruel and hard taskmasters, customise with their own names and logos to give themselves a hint of respectability.

Just down the boulevard are the tall glass and chrome buildings where you'll find a whole host of software companies that have got rich on the back of the thriving back street businesses promoting their quality backlink services. They produce the software products that take a lazy individual and make him rich. Except they don't make anyone rich.

So we move on to Article Alley. Read the notice boards in all of the shop windows here. Apparently, if you write articles that other people can reproduce on their web sites, you end up with ten of thousands of one-way backlinks, where sites link to you, but you don't have to link back.

The vendors in Article Alley are very convincing. They take all of the work away from creating a great web site. If you can't write yourself, or if you're too lazy, they'll often help you find somebody who can write for you in your own native language, yet based thousands of miles away where your language is their third language, so you can be certain to get a great, well written, articulate article that you can send promote in Article Alley.

For years I've wasted time submitting articles to article sites, using software made especially for the job, feeding yet another tranche of gurus and software builders.

Come out of Article Alley and move on across to Content Close. Browse the shelves of the many stores and you'll find all the content you could possibly want. The quality varies and so does the price. For just a few dollars, which is the universal currency of Search Town, you can pick up expert articles written by people you'll never meet, from countries that you've never heard of.

Sure, you won't make any sense of the writing, but then, this is content made for search engine, not humans. It's called spider food. And it stinks. Really bad.

Blog Street is interesting. The many vendors here tell you that in order to get your site ranked in the top ten of Google, you need to blog on each of your sites.

Maybe. But again, go down Blog Street and you'll soon discover a bunch of gurus waiting to sell you their latest tome on how to create the perfect blog.

You'll discover software vendors giving away their latest blog software and hundreds of market traders selling pretty templates, widgets and other wares to create the killer blog. There are book sellers too, of course.

Be careful in Search Town as the place is full of misinformation and every corner leads to yet another avenue crowded with sharp suited salesmen eager to take your last penny from you.

Many who venture into Search Town come out much poorer and with little to show for their efforts. Gloom and despondency is the order of their day, for no sooner have they unpacked their goodies, the new toys that will solve all of their problems, than they start getting the follow-up mail - and it all starts again.

So, what's the answer to top search engine positions?

It's easy.

First, concentrate on a niche market and don't deviate from that subject. You can't have a web site about internet marketing selling the concept of blue bananas.

Build your web site using your own original content. This blog article took me 15 minutes to write for example. I quite liked writing it.

Add new content regularly - once a week or once every two weeks. It doesn't have to be a blog and you don't have to do that on all sites. The idea is to create ONE site with plenty of content.

When you have the one site up and running, begin adding text links to other sites that you wish to promote. Not other people's sites though.

Don't link back to your main site.

Create excellent meta descriptions for each page that you make.

Target the key phrases you want ranked carefully, by creating a new page for each search term. Pages rank, web sites don't.

Carefully craft you page titles, ensuring that your key phrase is included there.

Make sure you have robots text file uploaded to your server.

Create a site map and link every public page to it.

Create a Google sitemap too - it's a bit more complicated, but well worth the effort.

That is all I do these days.

I've been going through the stats on some of my mos important sites. One site I launched only a few weeks ago now has 1171 top 10 search positions across the 5 major search engines.

Another I did for a client is number one in Google for the search term she particularly wanted. There is plenty of competition for the search term and I have done nothing except on-page optimisation for the site. No back links, no cloaking, no clever tricks.

Oh yes, the site was created using XSitePro and I recently revamped it using XsitePro2.

Sorry search gurus, I've just p'd on your parade, but don't worry because there are still plenty of suckers to fleece.