Some clarification about maintaining your rankings

Yesterday I wrote a post on Maintaining Your Rankings which attracted the attention of a friend and local ‘old school’ SEO Ben Wilks.

In Ben’s post he states:

Now I am not ripping into Pete too far here, but I disagree with his advice. What scares me is the fact that nobody has pulled him up on it. This advice simply would not work it the areas I play in as they are simply too competitive. So perhaps a little disclaimer about the types of serps in the post may have been appropriate.

a. Following this advice would lead my clients sites no where
b. People agreed with the advice (including GerBot?)
c. It’s a little scary to think that this could even work (unless it’s a barebones site ranking by the skin of it’s teeth)
For anyone to optimise past a client in an established niche you are going to need only one thing – LINKS – and not social media links either, they would help, but not the point!

And the thing is… he’s right. The advice I provided was overly simplified and some novice webmasters may end-up very disheartened when they discover their site isn’t in the top 10 after following my advice.

So, why would I try and mislead my readers?

To explain this, I’m going to use another fitness analogy (it worked well in the last post, so here we go again).

If you want to lose weight, you know that you should do some exercise, eat healthier foods, eat smaller portions etc. etc. but just because this is obvious doesn’t stop every personal trainer and fitness fanatic from telling you the moment you mention losing some pounds.

A personal trainer may give varying levels of advice for free, but they won’t write-up a personalised exercise program until you book-in for a proper appointment (which usually costs money).

The advice I was giving in my last post was like a trainer telling you to eat right and do some exercise. You may not lose much (if any weight) and if you’re particularly unfit or obese, then you’re not likely to see any benefit at all because your situation requires professional attention. But at least by applying the advice, you’ve taken the first step to improving your health (or website).

Now for the proper advice if you’re really serious about improving your rankings

If you are in a competitive industry, you’ll be facing an uphill battle as things like the age of your domain name, the number of inbound links and the age of those links all play a critical factor in ranking well in the SERPs.

Unfortunately you can’t make your domain name any older than it already is, nor can you magically make the links to your site any older. Fortunately, you can start building a very solid profile of trusted, topical, keyword specific inbound links.

Although before you do any of that, you’ll need to do a few things…

Clearly identify your goals

Every website is different, and therefor they all have very different goals. Some websites might be trying to concentrate on brand awareness, others want to be found for specific products or services, while other sites are trying to improve their status within their niche.

Each goal will require a different approach, so it’s essential to establish the goals before you do anything else.

As I don’t have the time to write (and you probably don’t have the time to read) about every possible scenario, I won’t go into specifics, but instead, stick to techniques that can be applied to most cases.

Keyword Research

Once you’ve established your goal, it’s time to research the appropriate keywords that will help drive the most qualified traffic to your site.

We wrote a post about it here: 4 Step Guide to Keyword Research or for an even better write-up, have a look at Search Engine Land’s article Doing Keyword Research? Here Are Some Resources To Help!

Link Building

Now when I say link building, I don’t mean getting a bunch of links from sub-par directories, random unrelated websites, linkbait, forum signatures, blog comments, reciprocating links (positioned on links pages containing hundreds of other vaguely related industries) , purchasing links through a broker, linkfarms, outsourcing the process to second-rate agencies etc. etc.

No, when I say ‘link building’ I mean manually contacting highly relevant websites that are specific to your industry, forming a relationship and then encouraging them to link to you.

I’m not saying that the above techniques don’t work, because they ALL do (to some extent). I know this because I’ve personally tried each and every one of them. Some work better than others, some will continue to work for at least another 12 months, some are so worthless that you might as well not even bother.

But if you want the absolute best results which will work today, tomorrow and in years to come, and you have both the time and the money, you can’t go past the manual approach of handcrafting each link request.

Once you’ve found places to link to you, the other factors to consider are the anchor text and the location of the link (both the page the link is on and the physically position within that page). Vary your anchor text and avoid having your link placed too deep within the site (ie. not located on a page 12 sub-folders down) and try and make the link seem like a natural part of the document (not squeezed into a footer with a dozen other links).

Onsite Factors

There are many onsite factors that you can tweak to improve your results, but onsite work alone won’t do much unless you have a well indexed domain with plenty of inbound links.

Including your keywords (without stuffing them) in your content, correctly using titles and headings. Meta descriptions (although having no impact on your actual ranking) can help improve click-through rates and research has shown that click-through and bounce rates do have an impact on your rankings.

Mentioning your location can help with localised results and using your keywords as anchor text throughout your content to drive people deeper into your site is also important (for both usability and SEO).

Another usability factor (once again isn’t specifically related back to SEO, but can help attract better quality links and generally improves your clients experience) is to have a nicely designed website.

Some sites also gain benefit from directing the flow of link juice using nofollow for certain pages and if you have a site with dynamic URLs I’d strongly suggest employing some URL rewriting.

Conclusion

I could go into robots.txt files, 301’s, discuss the benefits of registering domains that contain keywords, using location specific domain names and hosting, go into some blackhat techniques etc. etc. but I think that if you’ve made it this far, you now understand that the initial post about having good content and some links was an overly simplified version and for more competitive industries, you really need to do a lot more than just that.

It’s also important to understand that I’m a huge fan and advocate of social media and I do believe it can yield great results… and with the way things have been going, I think it’s essential to be used in conjunction with some (or all) of the factors above for optimal performance.

You will also find me using some of the link building techniques that I said are not the most effective (obviously after explaining the implications to the client and gaining their approval to do so) because even though they aren’t the best, they still work when combined with more traditional techniques.

Ben, you’ll also be pleased to know I fixed the footer (recently had the blog redesigned and there were a few minor things like that which were overlooked, so thanks for bringing it to my attention)… and the reason I didn’t drop rank when I changed our title (which was an intentional change) is because of the anchor text used in our inbound links (but I shouldn’t have to tell you that)

You might also want to fix-up your hidden text and the indexing of all your category pages to avoid canonicalization issues.

For all my other readers – sorry for the length of this post and lack of images. I quickly threw it together and tried to cram as much information as I could which will result in errors and omissions.

Love to hear your feedback on the types of posts you’d like to see here in the future – detailed posts such as this one or more generalised posts like the last one?

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