So how is it done?

I get asked this all the time. It is simple really, you basically have to have the best website in your subject which means two things: great content and inbound linking. If you have the best content (unique and informative) and the best inbound links (from strong trusted sites) you will be top or somewhere close.

If a competitor site has more information on your subject and more quality inbound links it will rank higher than yours. You may have heard of the saying “Content is King”, this is true as without content your site will not rank high. The first thing to remember is that search engines are text analysis systems, so they analysis the text on a webpage. The programs that crawl the sites (spiders) will look at all the words on your website including the actual domain name, the title of the page and headings. What is important is that each page on your website has a descriptive title of what that page is about, with the keywords your targeting. I always say when you look at a webpage imagine it's a sheet of paper, if you can tell what that page is about in 2 or 3 seconds, then the search engines will.

The other aspect which is equally important is link building. Inbound linking is where another website links to you. The easiest way to describe it is it's like being popular at school, if your friends with the 'cool' kids then you get some credibility. The same can be said from websites, if your have links from good 'cool' websites you get points. There is a complex mathematical algorithm which I won’t go into here, but basically every webpage gets a vote from another site being an inbound to your site. People tend to think the more links you have the better, however it’s not that simple. Search engines see these votes kind of like a popularity vote and will rank you accordingly but they also analysis the page the link is on. So if the page is not relevant (the same subject) it will not get taken into the equation, also the amount of links on a page is part of the mix, the more links on a page the lower the weight or strength of that link.