Top ranked Sites | High Quality Content and Top 10 Rankings

May 6, 2009 by 360wellnessguy

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”Top ranked Sites | High Quality Content and Top 10 Rankings”

Top ranked sites rise above the ocean of competing pages of the content cloud to achieve top 10 rankings because of high quality content, basic SEO and Content Syndication.

If you pay attention to Kevin Kelly’s predictions for the next 5,000 days of the internet, the competition for positioning on the 1st page of search engine results pages (SERP’s) will become even tougher in the days ahead. (See link below to the Kevin Kelly video under previous articles).

Kevin Kelly like all master story tellers has the rare talent, grasp and ability to cram the 5,000 day history of the internet plus the forecast for the next 10 years in a richly entertaining half hour snapshot presentation.

He says in essense that the trend towards the convergence of all media channels into One Single Net Machine is resulting in staggering volumes of user-generated content flows as we moved from the original idea of the internet of linking PC’s to PC’s (web1.0) to the present stage of the internet linking WebPages to WebPages (web2.0) and the next phase of the internet linking ideas/things to ideas/things (coded/tagged through keywords).

These massive data flows and the accompanying need for efficient systems to track and retrieve information in the content cloud of that One Single Net Machine explains the accrued importance of understanding and applying even rudimentary search engine optimization techniques. There is no other way to ensure that your data and content be found. Here’s Kevin Kelly’s summary of the staggering volumes of data produced globally on the net today:

§ 100 billion clicks per day;

§ 55 trillion links between all the web pages in the world;

§ 2 million email messages per second;

§ 1 million IM messages are processed every single second;

§ 8 terrabytes of traffic are processed every single second;

§ 65 billion phone calls are made per year;

§ 255 exabytes magnetic storage is globally available today;

§ 600 billion RFiD tags are in Use worldwide;

The information and data onslaught described here predates the explosive entry of hurricane Twitter on the mainstream media scene and before Oprah Winfrey joined the game changing technology which is now rewriting rules of social and business intercourse. It must be considered game changing if a guy like Kevin Rose (founder of Digg) says he’s considering redirecting his Personal Blog to his Twitter Page. Not since the advent of the mobile phone and the internet has technology been adopted so rapidly by so many people throughout the world – which also means gazillions more content being created and indexed by the search engines daily.

I hope this does not scare you from venturing into Blogging for business purposes or Blogging for a Cause to campaign for donations to your favourite charity. According to Michael Gerber, award winning business guru and author of bestselling The E-Myth Revisited, there is nothing to be scared of if we model the behaviour of successful people. He says:

” …people who are exceptionally good in business aren’t so because of what they know, but because of their insatiable need to know more… The greatest business people I’ve met are determined to get it right no matter what the cost.“

That urge and determination to get it right, no matter what the cost is in my view also the main challenge confronting newbie and established webmasters alike in the age of the information overload. The challenge is to learn, master and apply the skills to produce high quality content which engages, informs, inspires and entertain site visitors.

Whilst it is difficult for newcomers to compete against established sites with such high search engine results page (SERP’s) placements, it is reassuring to know that there are many examples of relatively new sites obtaining top 10 rankings and up to PR5 ratings by merely concentrating on the basic SEO factors or by focusing on the delivery consistent fresh high standard content. Examples like the come from nowhere Susan Boyle’s Story of Britain’s Got Talent, which conquered a global audience in the space of two weeks, illustrate that good quality stories will rise to the top.

Find below some of the high quality content characteristics of topranked sites found in the top 10 ranking for any keyword phrase:

Choose a niche and develop your site content blueprint around that niche.
Research or outsource the search for the site keyword blueprint i.e. keyword phrases actaully searched for by web users in the targeted niche – The worst thing is to open a shop and no one turns up because you are stocked with items people are not looking for..
Organize the keywords around a few categories/theme clusters in order to prepare related themed content around those topic clusters;
Research and Write truthful catching Headlines (titles) for each keyword phrase in a theme cluster for which you wish to be ranked. The bottom line is to draw attention without being misleading.
Write or have written Clean, Lean, Engaging, informative, inspiring and entertaining content around the chosen trending (popular) keyword phrase topics. Prepare multiple versions of the same content for submission to multiple article directories. Adjust the narrative style to the different social network and forum audiences and strike a balance between expert jargon (which shows you know the topic) and language which leaves your site visitor with a “wow now I get it” experience.
Offer Your Own Unique Perspective – There are 6 billion of us on the planet concerned by the same issues in life. But no one experiences reality in the same. It not the x diet offer but Susan’s Experience with X dieting offer which makes the story unique for site visitors. This is why Gary V……… has a greater following than countless wine experts more knowledgeable on wine than him. Check out Charles Hefflin’s Ten Social Media Commandments. as an excellent guide for the do’s and don’ts for success with regard engaging content. As he states, the social media revolution has changed the rules of engagement for old Internet marketing and heralded the dawn of the “New SEO”.
Use Bulleted Sub-headers to break down and summarize main take away points.
Optimize the content for indexing by search engines by paying attention to inclusion of targeted keywords in title as well as meta tags and remembering to bold, underscore plus italicize the keyword once in the article body;
Use Professional Illustrations – A picture is worth a thousand words. Use alttags including the keyword in them to get maximum ranking benefit from illustrations on your site. An excellent example of professional illustrations complimenting and adding value to great, entertaining and informative site content with minimalist design and graphics is Rusty Moore’s Fitness Black Book.
Avoid Forced Registration or Intrusive Ads – Follow Jack Humphrey, author of the Friday Traffic Report’s advice and avoid the “noisy page syndrome” , i.e. your site’s too good – there is too much going on– with the result that like kids in a candy store we do not know where to look and miss the point about why we came to site for in the first place.
Model Professional magazine Lay-out and Typography used in commercial media – There is an art and science behind the lay-out and typography styles popular with most users which was developed and fine tuned over years. See and model what works.
Provide Links to Sources and Additional Information – Use plug-ins and widgets like Zemanta to provide site visitors with references to additional relevant articles and Blogs on the same topic. Do not look at it as refering your site visitors to competitors – look at it from the spirit of gaining trust of your site visitor by sharing useful references .
Constantly maintain and update your site content in order give reason for search engines to revisit and continuing to index your content as relevant, fresh and up to date for the purposes of site visitor search queries.
Information about the Author (Author’s Resource Box) – Follow best practices taught by most article directory sites and by leading newspapers.
Promote your content through Content Syndication Services to ensure that it gains visibility across the major social network services like Digg, Delicious, Social Median etc and generate at the same time valuable inbound links as sites visitors bookmark your content.

Your search engine results pages (SERPs) placement, your site ranking and page rank will thank you for it. Look out for the next article in this series which will focus on Content Presentation tricks of the trade used by High Quality Content Top ranked sites to achieve top 10 rankings despite the ocean of competition.

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The Previous Articles in the SEO essays series: