Getting to top 10 without an SEO expert

Is it possible to get to the top 10 for a keyword (that's not too popular, it's very specific relating to a specific location, a province) without an SEO expert?

How would a beginner go about doing this the white hat way of course. Build up the PR? Get thousands of page ranks? Work on keyword saturation?

Thanks

 

Forget about PR

Links with good anchor texts do the magic

 

So when I work on building links, they should have the keyword on it rather than just the site's name?

What else is a major factor in ranking? Thanks

 

well if you look for rankings for Stupid News

You need links with anchor text Stupid News got it ?

forget about name of site it's doesn't mather only the keyphrase/keyword targeted to have maximum efect

Plus a good idee will be to have that keyphrase in Title of the site

 

It's a lot easier to rank top 10 for keywords that are not competitive. I wouldn't worry myself too much over metatags or keyword saturation. You should concentrate on link building with your preferred anchor texts. And, you probably won't need that many backlinks if your keyword competition is low.

 

I'm not sure how competitive my keyword is. Is there a tool online which lets you know how many "competitor" sites are using the same keywords?

 

Well...a simple test would be to go to Google, and type in the exact phrase or keyword that you would want to rank top 10 for. If you see 10,000,000 results: thats tough competition. If you see 500,000 results: thats fairly low competition.

Find some free directories to submit to. There's a ton within this forum: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=65

A lot of the newer directories haven't been cached because of the Google sandbox, but if you find some that have PR, I recommend those. Google's #1 rank factor in my opinion, is backlinks. Then, content.

 

Thanks for the link

I just checked my keywords and there are a total of 85 result pages for that word.. is this tough competition? Or is it possible to rank pretty well without highering an SEO expert?

 

that doesn't mean much. Even with just 5000 result, it could be extremely hard to go top ten. It is all how about how strong that top ten is.

there are a lot of medical term i would like to rank well..but there are page from webmd wikipeida or other "trusted" site that not only have great link, but also high quality content. I won't waste my time on those..


use nichewatch.com to see how strong that top ten page is..

also, use this http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/ to see how many searchs were made last month...getting into top ten for a keyword that no one search for is just plain waste of time

 

PR has less and less to do with how you rank, it's the links back and related sites that seem to be getting the upper hand

 

a lot of hobby sites I see daily where there is no seo involved, just people creating something they are into and getting a ton of natural links. Many people rank top 5 for some of the toughest terms and have no clue how they did it.

 

Quality unique content and they have been there for a while

 

Yeah, most of those seem to be at least 2-3 years old, some like 9 years.

 

Having a keyphrase or keyword in your domain DOES help. If i owned videogames.com you better believe most search engines are giving me a higher rank for "video game" related searches since the straight verbatim keywords in the domain. Spotty advice never paid off for anyone.

/ignores spelling errors

 

yes its possible i did it for "my wii" just read all you can on seo

 

yeah you really need to get some reasearch done so you have some idea of what you are doing.

 

definitely helps, especially when you have a two word domain. And no need to go for dashes either.

 

I'm #1 and #3 for my main keyword and I have over 68 million competitors. So all I can say is, if I can do it, ANYONE CAN. I didn't know what the hell I was doing.

But I did make sure that my anchor text wasn't always the same in my backlinks. I didn't do recip links, just articles. And sometimes people link to me without asking them. So my anchor text always varies. I think if your anchor text is always the same, google doesn't like that. By changing it up a bit, it looks more natural.

If you can understand what I just said, awesome! Cause I sure don't. I'm so tired I shouldn't even be in here. If I just talked a bunch of crap, please feel free to point that out. Maybe I'm totally wrong about the anchor text thing.

 

Yeap its possible. Concentrate on content/quality back links. Place keywords in anchor text.

 

Wow, that's amazing do you still have to work really hard to maintain that spot? (adding more back links...)