Do you want to know what it takes for your website to rank at the top of search engines? It’s about links. Links are the most fundamental building blocks of the Internet and search engine optimization (SEO).
As Google explains on its technology page [google.com/technology/], inbound links (links pointing to your website from other websites), and Google PageRank are critical to ranking high in the Google search engine. In fact, we’ve found that inbound links (also called “backlinks”) and the keyword-optimized text in and around those inbound links account for about 95% of optimization for the “Big 3” search engines: Google, Yahoo! and MSN search.
SEO Gap Analysis:
If you want to know what it takes to get top rankings for your keyword phrases, follow these 4 steps…
one) Identify your keyword phrases – Research and identify which keyword phrases your target market uses to search for products or services like yours. Make a list.
two) Analyze top Google sites for your keyword phrases – Simply go to Google, type in the keyword you want to rank for, and see which competitor sites rank the highest. Take note of their URLs. For example: competitorsite1.com, competitorsite2.com, etc.
3) Anchor text analysis – Now, go to Yahoo.com and run an anchor text analysis to see what your incoming link text is saying. See the exact anchor text they are using by searching Yahoo! like this… link: http://www.competitorsite1.com This will display a list of websites that link to your competitor’s site. Click on the links, look at each web page and take note of the link text that hyperlinks to your competitor’s website. You’ll want to use the same (or very similar) anchor text that your competitors use. NOTE: This takes a long time! To speed things up, I highly recommend Brad Callen’s “SEO Elite” software. Simply open SEO Elite, type in the keyword phrase you want to analyze, click on all 5 search engines, and have the software find ALL the links.
4) Allinanchor Ranking Analysis – Then go to Google and do the following searches to see who is ranked first in these…
allinanchor: keyphrase
allintitle: keyword phrase
allintext: keyword phrase
For example:
If you’re a real estate agent in Bend Oregon, you’d like your site to rank #1 for “Bend Oregon real estate agent,” right? Of course, do the following Google searches for allinanchor…
allinanchor: bend oregon real estate broker
allintitle: Bend Oregon Real Estate Agent
allintext: bend oregon real estate agent
Why are we doing this?
This is how you investigate to see who has more…
1) incoming links that say “bend oregon realtor”
2) links to pages that say “bend oregon realtor” in the page title
3) links to pages that say “bend oregon realtor” in the page text
Because…
If your website can rank highest for all 3, you should get top 10 ranking on Google (usually #1!) Basically, this is how search engine optimization works.
If your site ranks low for “allinanchor”, you need more backlinks with your keywords in the “anchor text”, links that include the keyword phrase in the hyperlink text.
If your site ranks low for allintext or allintitle, you need to get more “relevant links”, ie links from web pages that include the keyword phrase in the text and title.
Simple as that!
