Let me take you sometime back when I first developed a site for myself and gained the top position in Google, Yahoo and AltaVista without much SEO. I was on page one of Google, Yahoo and AltaVista, in fact on first position, just after a few days I launched my site. The delay of those few days was only because the search engines had to find and index my site. Lol. I didn't applied any tricks - no hidden links - no Meta Tags or ALT parameters over-stuffing - didn't went for hundred of inbound links.
The only thing I did was to develop a matchless product for a specific niche.
I was working as a professional developer then - working for an open source web application in my free time and developed several modules for them. One of those modules caught my eye as it was a module asked by a lot of people. They were asking for more and more features and I was sort of getting challenged to introduce them. Suddenly, I realized that there are numerous similar products in the market but not even a single one of them with a professional standard wearing GNL license shoes. An idea strike!!!
I worked to make a basic yet stand-alone product for months. With the product ready, I then designed and coded the web pages, building an entire domain around this one complete idea.
Once the foundation was set, I started adding features either on people request or market requirements, and people loved it. I added forums to the site then, in order to communicate with people and many of them become volunteers as the product was an open source. The volunteers adopted the role of site & forum moderators, coders and the people who had no skills become supporting the product with new ideas. Very soon an active community was developed and we were (Yes! MY product become OURS; that was success) having automatic inbound links as we asked people to just put a link back to our site, which the search engines just loves.
This was the source of my success then and this is the key of success for anyone even now.
When the product + website were ready, I then turned to the TITLE, DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDS within the HTML code.
There has been a lot written about those three and no doubt search engines have started to discard several Meta Tags. But I do know this:
(1) The TITLE must be relevant and must be logical making sense when read by a human. If it contains two or three powerful keywords, I can't ask for more.
(2) The DESCRIPTION must be relevant containing your powerful keywords, but the title should merely not be repeated.
(3) The KEYWORDS used must appear in the homepage, but remember not to over-stuffing. Depending upon who you read, that ratio should be at least 10% - 15%.
Also, from material I've read, opinion is roughly split 50/50 about whether keywords should be in upper or lower case. I've opted to use all lower case,separated by commas with no spaces.
I spent a lot of time getting the title, description and first headline right and went through many variations before I was satisfied. Only when I had finished that process though, did I then develop my final keyword list.
Every webpage, although the site was growing, growing and growing, was thematically similar. The TITLE, DESCRIPTION, KEYWORDS and first headline were different for each page though - of course depending on their content.
When all was done, I submitted the website to all of the majors Search Engines manually with the major focus on Google, Yahoo and AltaVista Search Engines. (I use MSN instead of AltaVista now) on 31st August (My Birthday Launch) and just focused to update the contents and communicating with visitors for next 3 weeks.
When I checked the above three on september 22nd, there I was - Google; 1st page - ON TOP. Then I checked AltaVista - the results were not different here either. Yahoo took some time to index the website but once it was indexed, all of my complains were vanished as it was on top there as well when searched with my keywords.
SUMMARY:The most important lesson I learnt was that a unique product or idea for a niche product or market is critical, to achieve top rankings in SEPs.
Secondly, the whole domain was developed around that product. The people who visited the site were only interested in the product and everything regarding the product.
And, finally, I had given the search engines and directories what they want: Unique content rich web pages in a specific niche, being searched by targeted people who were interested!
I wasn't able to run the website later on due to continuous promotions at job and responsibilities getting increased. So I sold the website + product to a party who totally changed the brand making it a professional product. Now you can understand why I am not giving out a link. I finally left the job and started my own web company; SK Web Technologies. With some highly professional colleagues joining me, the company is doing well.
If you're interested in asking more, discussing your idea or want to develop something that would achieve successful results using my services, then contact me using my website seo-google-search engine-optimization-experts :: SK Web Technologies
