30 Days To Google First Page – Part 1

Being on the first page of Google is not an easy task, the more popular the keyword the harder it is to rank in the search engines.  If is often easier to rank for “Long Tail Keywords” or “Keyword Phrases” than it is for a popular single word.  I have had some great ranking success over the past few years and thought I’d target a keyword phrase that I want to rank for and show how I did it.

My target is “Michigan Business Directory” (without the quotes), most people search without using the quote marks around the phrase or keyword they are searching for. Currently out of 378,000 pages MichiganBusinessHub.com ranks #11 on Google (2nd page, we are also on the 2nd page of Yahoo).

Google (and Yahoo) show 10 listings per page, so the hub only needs to move up one position to be on the first page.  I have selected three of the ten sites on the first page to analyze in my quest for the first page.

In looking at michigan.bizhwy.com (ranked #6), albionmich.com/business.html (ranked #9) and free4allcity.com (ranked #10) my site is the newest one.  Google gives more weight to older sites – so this hurtle has to be compensated for in other areas, which I’ll discuss in future posts. All of these sites have a Google Page Rank of 4, the hub is only a 2 – yet another hurtle to overcome.  Page Rank usually takes time and is evaluated by the amount of incoming links and the quality of those links.

The interesting thing is that MichiganBusinessHub.com has more inbound links than two of the sites I am using to get on the first page of Google.  I will have to drill down and review the links to compare the quality - .gov and .edu links are very powerful, so several of those could outweigh a site that has more links of lower quality.

This week my goal is to get a link from each of the top ten sites and review the quality of links each site has.  Then also work on getting some of the same or similar links each site has.

Continued…

Tim Somers
MichiganBusinessHub.com