My personal definition of ranking well is when your brand (website URLs) show up in the Top 10 for just about anything a user queries about your industry. Further, the rankings you’ve achieved bring in a good amount of qualified traffic that responds positively to your desired call to action(s) and creates a conversion for you.

Seeing those numbers just triggered something in me to beat them – not the person’s website or the person, in fact that makes me uncomfortable, but give me numbers as a target and I’m off running with the hares. I’m a total newbie of about 4 months into learning with just one wp web up and running, but everything works and I understand how it works which helps! I now need to focus on the SEO within the posts. So again, thank you for this and everything else you have written.

Another great article of yours. I like your articles because they are not only helpful but easy and clear to understand. I have followed your advice in your 3 Steps to Search Engine Success and I am currently on Page 12 in Google with my keyword phrase Extra Income Ideas and about 1100 backlinks. So more work is required. I have been on page 1 with this keyword phrase but only for a couple of days and slowly moved back to page 12. Don’t know why.

Take care,
Martin

I always go for a sub directory rather than a sub domain as sub domains are almost viewed like completely different sites by Google and other search engines.

You probably need to build some more links to that sub domain to get it to index faster and get ranked. Also, be sure to link from your domain to your sub domain as well to pass on some link juice.

Cheers,
Suzanne

Doing a keyword search in Google with quotes around it will tell you the number of pages that have that exact keyword phrase on it. However, to check out your real competition you need to search without quotes (this is because users of search engines usually do not use quotes). Once you’ve done this, you’ll see the exact websites on page one that you need to beat!

The backlink checker tool is not going to be 100% accurate as it only shows that backlinks that the search engines publicly display. BUT, this will give you a very good indication of backlinks and will help you to understand roughly how many links you need to get to page one.

There are lots of great ways to build links including forum marketing, article marketing, press relase submission, directory submission, blog commenting, profile creation, link swapping, social bookmarking and more, so if you can build a variety of links from different sources (at a faster rate than your competitor) you should be able to increase your ranking.

Cheers
Suzanne

Well said. There is no easy answer for you to give. The bit I find hard is choosing the best keywords as often it is hard to understand the criteria for choosing one, especially when you get conflicting information. I haven’t found many good resources on choosing keywords apart from your book I purchased and another from a different author which told me something a bit different. He said that you have to do a keyword search in quotation marks to know your competition. However I still don’t fully know if I am targeting the right words. I think I am but it seems to take a while. I struggle in getting good backlinks as I find i hard to find lots of active article directories to submit to and get backlinks. Other than that I try to comment in 1 or 2 forums and on blogs. I don’t know how many backlinks I should be aiming for daily. It is a good tip that you have given to check out the backlinks for the top 3 results. I am not sure if that backlink tool is accurate though.