There is a formula for getting #1 rankings, or at least page one rankings on Google quickly and easily. The formula is quite simple; anyone can implement it with the right tools in a few minutes, a few hours, or a few days, depending on the tools available and the writing skills of the webmaster.

As an SEO guy myself, I’m a little hesitant to share all my secrets, but for those who are do-it-yourselfers anyway and wouldn’t spend the money to hire SEO help, I’ll provide a brief overview of the strategy. You’ll need to decide if you want to be in the webmastering business or some other business which needs the skills of a good webmaster. I do a lot of real estate sites, and there are some agents who can handle both their real estate business and their website SEO effectively. Most can’t.

In any case, here is quick summary of a strategy that has worked for me over and over to achieve page 1 and #1 rankings on Google.

Formula for a high-ranking website

Pick a good domain

Better yet, do your keyword research before picking what you think is a good domain. Many real estate agents come to me with a dozen “good” domains they’ve bought, only to find out that none of them will give them an advantage in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

Keyword research involves keyword discovery (or compiling a list of prospective keywords), then analyzing the metrics of those keywords to determine which ones would be good candidates for SEO. This is determined by a number of factors, primarily popularity and competition. In other words, how many people are searching for those exact keywords each month, and how many competitors do you have who are attempting to rank well for them?

A metric called KEI (keyword efficiency index) can be useful in setting SEO priorities for keywords, but I also don’t let KEI trump my own experience and instincts. KEI helps you to go after the low-hanging fruit; but don’t let it stop you from also going after the “big kahuna” keywords that are more competitive.

Use Joomla for the content management system

Joomla by no means is the only way to improve your website rankings fast, I’m just sharing with you my formula that I’ve developed over the years. We all develop tools, tricks and techniques honed by our experiences, and I’ve been ultra-successful developing Joomla websites that outperform other platforms – even WordPress (such as this site). WordPress is great, and I have to admit that I like writing in WordPress a lot more (sort of like I enjoy working on my Mac a lot more than working on my PC). But in the final analysis, I can do far more SEO on a Joomla site than on a WordPress site.

I’ve even had Joomla sites down for maintenance with the “down” page SEO’d make it to #1 on Google. Granted, the keywords were not hugely competitive in those cases, but still, Joomla is very pretty impressive for its SEO capabilities.

Write good content

“Good” is subjective, obviously. There’s no way I can tell you an exact formula for what to write, how many times to repeat a keyword or phrase, etc. I can just say that you need to make your content both readable to humans and accessible to search engines. You should give plenty of clues to search engines as to what your site is about in the content by making good use of headings, lists, as well as bold, strong, and emphasis markup.

Pick a good page title

This is not as subjective as it sounds. Simply use the same keywords you identified in your keyword research, and which are included in your domain. That is your page title, with very little extra verbage. Less is more. Focus like a laser beam, don’t try to be all things to all people. That’s a formula that only works on large, mature sites with a lot of “authority.”

Of course, you should pay attention to your meta description tag to improve the click-through ratio when your page does make it into the SERPs. You can pretty much ignore the meta keyword tag. Search engines ignore it, so why waste time with it?

Use internal links to your advantage

One of best “clues” you can give to a search engine about what a particular page is about is to link to it within your own site using the best keywords as the anchor text. If you have a page title of Blue Widgets, somewhere on your home page (preferably in your main menu navigation) should be a link to “blue-widgets.html” using the anchor text and title attribute of “Blue Widgets.”

Get backlinks from high-authority sites

Most of the above formula for improving your website rankings for a new site is what’s called on-page SEO (things that can be done on-site). You should also work to get some somewhat-related sites to link to yours. This will get your site indexed faster than if you just let Google find it randomly, or if you just submit it using Google’s submit form (which is largely used by amateurs).

Submit a sitemap to Google and Yahoo

There are plenty of good sitemap creation tools. They basically crawl your site, identifying all the URLs that are “visible” from the home page, and create a list of these URLs. Google’s sitemap format is an XML formatted file. Upload that to your site, and let Google know it’s there by entering it into Google’s Webmaster Tools.

If you follow this formula, you will have a great chance at getting page one rankings for your website in as short a time as possible. Of course, this depends on the quality of your content, the competition you have, and how well your Joomla CMS is set up for maximum search engine performance. If you need help improving the rankings of a real estate site, give me a call at (208) 249-8893.