Things you can do to move up in Google SERPS

Once every few months we need a thread where everyone can add their input on what is working and what is not!

With Google Caffeine in the UK pretty much Live and a roll out in the US in the process, lets see what we can put together:

My Findings for a bunch of my websites and other friends:

All my results are based on well established sites with high traffic targeting strong keywords

Not doing much:

• Blogrolls in theme/niche related sites
• Social links not in theme/niche related sites and bookmarking sites.
• Directory Submissions
• Press releases (waste of money if your industry is boring)

Some Movement:

• Article creation for ezinearticles and other such sites

Good Reactions (but for new content) not existing SERPS movement:

• Updating internal blog daily
• Adding unique content
• Using services like ping.fm and onlywire to distribute content updates to social networks
• Creating content based on the keywords users came to the site with. (Long Tail pages)
• Linking to pages from the homepage, the craigslist model of dumping loads of links on the homepage seems to be key. Linking from the homepage compared to 1 link deeper has a huge difference.
• Meta tags with Exact keyphrases working much better than just getting each word in and making it readable. (a real shame from a user point of view)
• I created a new site for a friend and linked to it from a blog and another website and ranked #2 in google for a not very competitive keyword in just a few days and have stayed there. I also got PR within a few days but that was because I caught it just before the PR update by pure chance.
• Profile creations on forum sites where you can add your bio and link data.

Waiting on results:

• Blog reviews by other sites
• Related Niche Link Exchanges
• More pages of content based on the same keyword all pointing to the keypage
• Affiliations with very high PR and Alexa sites
• Web Presenter videos on site (not expecting much if anything really)

Not tried

• Links wheels
• Getting blog in Google News
• Other suggestions?
• Contributing to forums (despite being market leaders in some of my niches, we are not welcome in posting signature links on many sites) Many are No Follow.
• Youtube videos

Things I have noticed

• Google is back to the old crappy method of ranking sites based on where the server is based, many businesses that dont have a specific geographic location have been hit hard by the US changes in the last few weeks
• UK traffic has been up and down because of so many public holidays in the last 8 weeks
• Made lots of recommended chnages using the page speed tool in firefox, as a result, AMAZING changes have been seen in GWT (Google Webmaster Tools), especially using gzip, huge increases in daily crawled pages and very small kb download. Weird however that Google still claims to be "Time spent downloading a page" is the same, despite all the other graphs.
• Canadian SERPS are more in line with UK and other localized results.
• A huge mistake made by google seems to be the removal of the button on localized results to select "Pages from the UK" this has now been moved to the left navigation options. Which absolute idiot came up with that. So now when I use the UK, Canadian, South African and Australian searches, I need to do a search first then filter the results. Why the hell did they do that? Just goes to show that Google decisions are only coming from the US. So as a results localized results are down in a huge way.
• Many No Follow links are showing in GWT "Links to site"

All in all if you have an established site there is not very much that seems to move results from top 10 to top 5 and the top results that google shows are not really that great, mostly full of people that have bought many many links in the last few years.

I am under the impression that a real interaction with multiple social chanels is a good way forward. The problem many sites have though is they are in very boring industries and are not going to get any attention from the social scene, so if this applies to all serps results then it will inevitably to spam content to fill this gap.

One last thing to note, is that any of the above techniques will work to get you from 100 to top 20, its working out what techniques actually make your site move in the top 10 taht we need to find out.

So, thats my contribution, anyone else care to share what is and is not working for them and their locations?

Cheers

 

Off page: Place link in content, and use variety keyword combination or even non-keyword as link anchor. Follow or not is not that important for SERP other than PR.

On page: gzip it, cache it, CDN it, remove js, remove css! make it as fast as possible

 

Why in the world would you remove CSS?

 

how does your site work without css? That seem to be distracting!

 

most important.

HIGH PR LINKS!

 

Build some off page High PR back link with Anchor text you would like to see for the SERP results

 

Linkwheels also had their time, not doing much anymore. Backlink anchors is what counts. Doesnt matter where as long as they are Dofollow and have a neat PR.

 

Yes Build some off page High PR back link with main Keywords...

 

Nice thread, appreciate it.

I've followed the Firefix plugin recommendations and got my site up to a 78 in the V2 ruleset, but I do not see any huge spike in crawled pages.

I see a deep search around the middle to late middle of last month and that's it.
All I have noticed is established sites still seem to be the top dog for random mentioning of keywords that aren't a part of their core content.

Can't wait for Caffeine because I am suffering.

 

really nice and informative thread thanks for shearing

 

Seems like a good idea. I find LinkWheels and High PR links help the most.

 

can you tell me how link wheel will help in the ranking.

 

making the quality relevant back links.

 

I am glad this thread is shedding some light for people, I hope others will share what is ACTUALLY orking for them right now as I think many of us are in our own unique niches.

One thing I noticed a little while ago was that, searches in the google.com (US) for UK services showed the same results as google.co.uk did and the same for US services on google.co.uk

I will update more when I get some new results.

 

Forum signature provide quality backlinks to your website...

 

how?
but if the forum is no follow.. did it's usefull in SERP

last week i try adobe forum...
and the admin removes my link lol

 

Even I have noticed that offlately that directory submissions and press releases are not working enough .A nice contribution from you .

 

I tried plenty of backlinks and blog commenting and updated the site regularly and so each page is getting indexed quickly...

 

I think they may have meant move it over to an external file.

I would also recommend the same with java script.

I think the best advice I could give is ... really optimize your title tags and headers.

 

A good sharing but I would prefer doing deep link buildings for now. It is seems Google does not judge each website based on individual link or homepage link only anymore. The deep links with naturally gained is another important factor for ranking in Google lately.

Above one is only my own assumption and not a fact based on any proven documents anyway.