So I wanted to put my search engine optimization skills to the test. I have spent more time reading and studying about SEO then I have practicing it. It’s nice to understand it but I wanted to get a site ranked number one on Google. My friend started a pool service company in Henderson Nevada so I figured i would do Henderson Pool Service. I looked up the keywords to see what I was up against. That is definitely not the most competitive phrase on the planet but with a little under 2 million search results I thought it was a good place to start. So first things first, you have to have a website before you can get ranked.

Choosing a domain name is very important! Not that you can’t have a domain name the doesn’t include your keywords and get ranked number one, but you definitely aren’t helping yourself. So I chose the domain www.hendersonpoolservice.info why .info? because .com was taken and .info was only 99 cents at godaddy at the time. Plus if you plan on getting your traffic from the search engines who cares if it’s .com or .kdkfjdkjhsdf So i am already ahead of the game by having my keywords in my domain. I spent about a week setting up the site and putting some flash on it to make it appealing to the eye. Feel free to check it out! if you are using wordpress for your website or blog. take the time to set up permalinks and always pay attention to the post slug when you are writing content. What next?

Content! i wrote about pool service and pool equipment and researched some stuff so that my site would be useful for people who were in the need of a pool cleaning. Okay so now I have a nice looking website with some useful content but i am no where to be found on Google.

Site maps and Google webmaster tools would be next. Always make a sitemap and submit it to Google. This is something that only takes a couple of minutes but is very important. You will get a much better crawl if you can help the googlebot find it’s way. After all of that I noticed that my site had made it to page 29!! I know nobody goes to the 29th page to find what they are looking for, but it shows that I was making progress.

So let’s recap, we no have an appealing site that is useful to our visitors. it has a lot of informative mostly content pages that are search engine friendly “Permalinks”! But wait I am not number one. Okay so here is the secret, well let’s say well know across the webmaster world secret. I spend about 60% of my time writing and developing my website and about 40% getting my site listed in relevant directories and on other sites. i often email other websites that are in the same genre as my site and offer to write about them or exchange links with them. So, I have been doing this the whole time for www.hendersonpoolservice.info and after about a month of working I had counted about 400 links to my website. One bright morning I checked my rankings and there I was number one for Henderson pool service. Like a shining star. Okay so I fell to about number 7 the next day but i kept at it and about a week or two later I was back and didn’t plan on going anywhere. as of right now that site is still number one. Hopefully after you read this it will still be there.

So as you can see you don’t have to be a marketing genius to be ranked well on Google you just have to know what they are looking for to fill their top spots. There is no trick to getting to the top without putting in the time. You can find more tips on search engine optimization on some of my other articles if you are going after some competitive keywords you will need to do everything possible to increase your chances. Keep on updating your site and keep on getting links and other webmasters to write about your site and you will get there. Good Luck!