All You Need To Know About SEO To Get Top Rankings In 2013

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the biggest industries in online marketing, but at the same time it is an industry where the majority of people know nothing about it other than rumors and rehashed information they read online.

SEO is like an urban legend with all sorts of exaggerated claims to scare you. Like if you were to create your site in a certain way or build backlinks in a certain way that the wrath of the Penguin and Panda would be unleashed upon you and your site would be outlawed from the search engine results… FOREVER.

SEO is actually easier than ever at current times if you know the recipe. Search engines determine which sites to rank at the top of their search results according to an algorithm.

This is essentially a computer program with a checklist of things that are good and bad. If the program evaluates your site and it meets all the good and no bad criteria on its checklist, you get rewarded with high rankings.

So, if you know a large part of these criteria, you’re going to be able to rank your sites highly. Over and over again, and that’s the simple truth of it.

I’ve spent the last year reverse engineering these criteria and testing all sorts of things to come up with a strategy to rank sites fast and effectively, and I finally figure it out. I’ll expand on that later.

Firstly, you need to understand that SEO was ridiculously easy a few years ago. You could literally rank sites in top positions for very competitive keywords by blasting your sties with thousands of links from automated tools (spam links, comment links, forum links etc).

Many webmasters and SEO’s took advantage of this back in the day and made a fortune from those top rankings. Then search engines wised up and started coming out with all sorts of changes and updates for their algorithms with the aim to reduce webspam and make it harder for people to manipulate search results through spamming.

Google released the Penguin and the Panda update in the last year and those updates created a huge turmoil in the SEO world. Thousands of sites lost their rankings, people lost their traffic and income overnight and nobody knew what to do in order to get those rankings back.

In fact, many agencies who relied on blog networks for client rankings lost all their business because they had no clue how to do SEO and the blog networks were not effective anymore.

If you were one of the victims of the Penguin or Panda updates and you lost your rankings, let me quickly explain what these updates did and how they work:

1- Unnatural Link Building

Going into the minds of the teams who own search engines, the first obvious way to eliminate webspam was to target the people who blasted sites with thousands of backlinks overnight with automated tools. This is usually a clear signal that someone is gaming the system and search engines don’t want this.

So, if your site is brand new and suddenly had 40,000 links added to it over 3 days, that is the kind of thing that will get your site flagged and likely flagged as spam (and thus you won’t rank).

2- Unnatural Anchor Text

The second thing that people who practice SEO would do is to build many links with the exact anchor text they want to rank for. This used to work very well (e.g. if you want to rank for Best Blenders, you would go and build all your links with that exact text linking to your site).

Search engines don’t want people doing SEO in this way, so they went out and created an update that flags and penalizes and site that has a very high percentage of links for one keyword.

In other words, if you have 100 links and 60 are all with the keyword Best Blenders, then you’ll get penalized. Currently you should aim to have no more than 25% off your links as any single keyword. (By the way, if your site has been hit with the updates in the last year, one thing you should do is look at your anchor text diversification in http://www.majesticseo.com.

If you see that you have more than 25% for any single keyword, try to add links with other anchor texts and there is a good chance that your site will come back in the rankings).

3- Onsite over optimization

The third thing that people who practice SEO would do is to excessively add their keywords to their website. So for example they would add Best Blender to their titles, meta descriptions, tags, footers, sidebars, image descriptions, heading texts and so on.

They would also excessively add these keywords to their content (sometimes with a keyword density of 5% or more, meaning that for every 100 words the keyword would appear 5 times).

This used to be very effective until the updates came along and targeted and penalized this kind of onsite optimization. Currently you’re better off using related keywords in various places, synonyms and a keyword density of 1%.

By avoiding the above 3 things, you’re already setting your site up for ranking well in the search engines. If you add to that the working elements of getting rankings, then SEO is really as simple as I told you it was earlier in the article.

It’s possible to get top rankings in a matter of days or weeks with brand new sites, for very competitive keywords. Over and over again, not with thousands of links and not by spending a fortune on SEO.

In a nutshell, here’s the SEO recipe that’s working to get top rankings:

Step 1

Create profiles on social networking sites and setup Google authorship.

Step 2

Create a variety of backlinks with different anchor texts using web 2.0 sites, article sites, bookmarks, wiki links, PDF submissions.

Step 3

Build high PR backlinks from relevant sites to your niche with the exact anchor text you are trying to rank for. These links can be bought, rented or acquired through networking (e.g. guest posts).

While it’s not possible to go into the exact details and step by step processes of doing all the SEO as I described above, this post contains the exact strategies and formula it takes to rank at the top of Google over and over again in a matter of days or weeks.

Together with my friend and popular blogger Glen Allsopp from Viperchill.com, we created the most comprehensive SEO training guide available online that shows you step by step how to rank your site from scratch.

The guide contains 5 live case studies where you can see from start to finish the exact process we used to rank 5 different sites in 5 different niches at the top spots of Google in a matter of days and weeks.

Jane’s note: As you’ve guessed, this guest post is written by Dirk a.k.a Diggy from Upgrade Reality. He’s one of my long time pals and a very nice guy. He is the co-creator of Backlinks XXX which I urge you to check out!

Disclaimer: The links to Backlinks XXX are my affiliate links. I have checked out the course and I’m proud to promote it. If you buy the course through my affiliate link, you’ll support my business, make my day, receive my wholehearted THANK YOU, but won’t spend anything extra! Thanks in advance!