How do you keep your website ranked on page #1 for Google?

[kenlee]

Hey guys!

I just had a quick question, Iv'e searched many topics on it over and over, but I wanted an experts opinion on the question I have!

Question: "Once ranked on page #1 for Google. Does your website stay on page #1 and keep climbing? Or do you have to keep feeding your website with more backlinks and content in order to sustain that spot on page #1?"


Thanks in advance!

 

[Marc]

Although I´m not an expert, I´ll try to give you a brief answer:

The main point for ranking is the competition. With only a bit competitive keyword your site will stay.
In a highly competitive niche however your site will probably fall back.

So simply watch your site, and if it falls, add one or two optimized articles with a few bookmarks + backlinks, and it will rank again
The better your site is optimized, the less you´ll need to do for the offpage optimization (backlinks, social bookmarks etc.).
I hope this helps a bit ...

 

[Marc]

I forgot to mention: Since Google´s penguin in April last year social bookmarks are more efficient for the offpage optimization than backlinks.
And it will be generally good to "refresh" a site occasionally with a new article, because of Google´s "freshness"-algo from November 2011 ...

Exciting, of when Google will open it´s algo zoo again, and which animal then will kill the social bookmarks ... lol

 

[tac88]

Before I make it to page one and the first or third spot that is my target area's I am aggressively building links.

Once I get to my rankings that I am after, I do more of a maintain link building pretty much slow down about 1/3 of what I was doing to get there..
Remember everything that you do with SEO think does this look natural to Google?

So you just can't stop building links that is when you will get sandboxes.

I hope that I helped you

 

[smilodon]

Obviously you wouldn't want to stop creating links when the website ranks. It would just seem unnatural. What you can do is drop the number of links you build slightly at start and a bit more a few weeks later, but don't just stop altogether.

 

[kenlee]

Marc: I totally agree! I was thinking that as long as you have low competition that are targeting those keywords, you should be able to stay on top for practically ever I suppose. I have a dummy website I tested with and its on rank 2-3 and it stays there and I dont do anything to it! I will take your advice though and add maybe 5-10 quality backlinks if I do see my site begin to fall back!

Also what do you mean by offpage optimization? Im quite new at SEO and im all ears to what you have to say!

I really appreciate all of your feedback on both of the threads I started Marc!


tacc88: Yes I see where you are coming from. Might I ask maybe you can share some of your techniques? I am new to SEO and I'm going solely off of what Jay Wesman says! I am open to new information like experts from yourself though! What are "natural" link building rates and what is sandbox? Thanks again!


smilodon: Thank You. What are "natural" looking rates you would recommend?

 

[smilodon]

smilodon: Thank You. What are "natural" looking rates you would recommend?

Well, if you build 100 links a day then suddenly dropping to 10 a day would be unnatural . Just use common sense. SEO is not a do it and forget it kind of job. But what can be good, if your site is interesting people would start sharing it to their friends, so you have your job done for you! That is one of the reasons why content is important.

 

[kenlee]

Ahh ok. Because I believe I did that with one of my sites and it got dropped after awile. So I switched over to weekly. But then if you had say 50 sites...wouldn't link building begin to get very overwhelming? Where would one go to hire services or workers to build links then at that point?

 

[smilodon]

Ahh ok. Because I believe I did that with one of my sites and it got dropped after awile. So I switched over to weekly. But then if you had say 50 sites...wouldn't link building begin to get very overwhelming? Where would one go to hire services or workers to build links then at that point?

Odesk, Elance, etc.

You never know, sites may even stay on top for a good while without your continued effort. Google is unpredictable . I know there are sites people haven't touched in years that still rank good. I even know of cases where people would start working on such sites again and they would suddenly drop in rankings.

But generally, at least for me, the goal is to create something people will naturally share. And it really isn't that tough. Its usually just sites that are fairly comprehensive. For example having a World of Warcraft related site with a separate page for each class, or possibly even for each common build for the classes. Then having a few pages for crafting, for different game towns etc. Really nothing too special.

Its just much easier people will like/link to a fairly comprehensive site like that than a 5 page site.

 

[kenlee]

Ah ok! Yes I do have one website that has been sitting at rank spot #2-3 for the past few months and there has been no SEO done to it! I think its a matter of who all is targeting those exact keywords! But yeah I like your idea of building content that everyone can share!

 

[Marc]

Also what do you mean by offpage optimization?

A few term definitions for a better understanding:

- on-page optimization is everything that you do on your site, for example internal and external links.
Internal links connect the pages on your website with each other.
Google likes that much, because internal links allow their crawlers a simple and fast indexing of the website.
External links are the links which are pointing away from your site to other external sites.
E.g. your partner- or affiliate-links are always external links.
You always should cloak and hide them as "No Follow", so that Google´s bots can´t read them out,
as Google doesn´t like "pure affiliate" sites. Google likes quality content with relevant information, but not pure selling sites.

- off-page optimization however is everything that you do on other sites or services, but not on your own site. These are the backlinks and bookmarks.
They are a kind of "recommendation" for your site which you set on other sites to point at your site, and therefore they are very important.
Not to be confused: backlinks point from other sites to your own site, while external links guide from your site to the aff offer or wherever.
And internal links connect the subpages of your site among themselves.

A final word to the proportion of on-page and off-page optimization:
The experience indicates, that Google prefers quality content with relevant information.
In the long run the on-page optimization is more important than the off-page optimization.
(I would say a proportion of 75% to 90% on-page, and the rest off-page optimization.
But that depends on the competition and the size of the site. A big site with many topics needs more backlinks than a microsite.)

Long story short: A relevant content + on-page optimization is the most important in the long term.
But the off-page optimization is also very important, as you need "recommendations" for your site from outside, especially at the beginning.
Google reads these "recommendations" and thinks: Aah, this site is relevant, it has a lot of recommendations.
But caution: Never to many backlinks, always "natural" (I never would do more than three to ten backlinks and bookmarks per day.)
It were exactly these sites with thousands of (often outsourced) backlinks, but BS or almost no content on it, which were sunk by Google´s penguin ...

Good luck (Why do my posts always be so damn long? )
​

 

[kenlee]

Marc,

Its really not a problem that your post are long! Knowledge is knowledge! I mean its crazy how much of a gold mine this forum contains! Its like going to school or something man! But good advice! I always read each post carefully!

 

[K]

In my experience, if you keep adding valuable and good content with the occasional high profile and highly targeted backlink you will remain in the first page.

 

[kenlee]

Agreed! I have found that it doesnt really matter as long as the competition is relatively low! Its quite easy to get on top of google pretty quickly!

 

[Marc]

^^ That´s exactly what it is: low competition is the magic word !!
Why make life unnecessarily difficult, if one can occupy the top spots for easy niches

 

[jjarrett]

I want to give you a different perspective on this. Everyone who answered this thread gave some good answers, but there's one other thing you need to think about here.

Maybe this is because I come out of a customer service background, but this is the way I see it. There's way too much focus on getting to the top of the search engines, or marketing, or whatever, and not nearly enough emphasis on readers, subscribers, and customers.

Google has never bought one product from me, but I have sold thousands of products to individual customers. Your focus should be on your readers first and the search engines second.

Now maybe I have the luxury of saying this because my sites are all over the place, they rank well for long tail keywords, and I hate doing research on my topic because a lot of times the number one site is mine. A lot of times I have multiple first page rankings.

My suggestion to you is this: focus on your offer. What are you offering your potential customers that no one else is offering. The real secret to internet marketing isn't first page rankings, or how many articles you've written, or anything like that. It's your following. How many people are interested in what you have to say?

Now, with this said, here's a little "trick" you can use to get your site to the top. It won't actually be your site, but if you think about putting your offer at the top instead of just your site, you can make this happen in days, or even hours.

Find a website related to yours that is in the top 50,000 most visited websites in the world. You can use Alexa to tell you this. Put your offer there. Optimize your offer for the search engines and see what happens.

I did this with a webinar I was offering. Posted it to a tickets site and within hours, that offer was page 1 for my keyword.

These are only suggestions. This is my opinion, but it's worked for me over and over. Find out what your target audience wants and give it to them, and you can still rank on page 1.

Good luck,

Jinger

 

[nightmare247]

All good and very useful information. very glad im a member of this forum!
thanks again guys!

 

[adsrealmedia]

DDos . very fast LOL

 

[CashAdsSarrah]

First of all make sure that the on-site navigation is the site is coherent and friendly. Google obviously directs its users to more user friendly sites.
The updating of the site should be an easy to do task. Change the content of the website periodically in order to keep the site alive in Google rankings.
It is not a wise option to buy links and make the fake domains for increasing the Google ranking. Instead you should go for a more decent option by adding some good quality content to your website. It’s nice and easier.
The quality of the content which you are going to add on your site is important. Make sure that the content is informative and nicely written according to the requirements of the readers.
With the consultation of SEO expert, you can target some of the Keywords as per the latest market trends and after that you may include those keywords in the content which you are going to write for the promotion of your site.
You may well write a number of articles on the targeted Keywords which you can post on different article directories. Anchor text at the end of the article will lead the reader to visit your site.
Posting press releases on different PR sites is also an effective tool which will update the people about the latest news and updates about your company. Once again the quality of the content is important here else Google will ignore all this effort by you or your writer.

 

[K]

^very nice points there again Sarah! I will stress again, constant quality and relevant content will work wonders!