Hi all, I want my site to appear at the top in google.co.uk for the keyword hypnotherapy. Is this impossible? What would be the first step?
The first 3 results for hypnotherapy are www.thehypnotherapyassociation.co.uk www.hypnotherapists.org.uk en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnotherapy The number of links to each of these pages according to yahoo are: 1) 1,130 2) 3,520 3) 520 All other ranking factors asside this shows it is possible to rank well with just 520 links (provided they are of same value). Further analysis is required such as: *the condition of your own website compared to that of these 3 *a full count on how many links pointed to these sites contain hypnotherapy in the anchor text *a full count of how many of these links are one way *a full count of how many are directory links, paid links (if easily detected), natural links *a full count of how many links to each site are PR0, PR2, PR3, PR4, PR5, PR6, PR7, PR8, PR9 and PR10 Having aggregated all this information you have an almost complete picture of the link profiles of each of these sites and the state of their onsite optimisation. Once you have this information you have to ask yourself whether you could create an equal or similar link profile and optimise your site in a similar way. If this answer is yes you're good to go, if no - then you'll have to seek someone who can.
Thanks for this... I have just checked my sites (http://www.hypnotherapistfinder.com/) links at yahoo and came back with only 219... I currently appear at #6 for the keyword that I am going for... So, I guess I need to get more links (about 1000 more) with the link text as 'hypnotherapy'... Any ideas on where to start? Also, how do I work out how many links the competition has with hypnotherapy in the anchor text? Also any ideas for the onpage optimization on the site. I would also like to optimize it for hypnosis, hypnotherapist and hypnotherapists also in the future... Thank you so much for your help.
Can anyone recommend any services that I could use? Also how quickly should I get all of these new links?
@burtie - to analyse the links of your competitors I use a free tool called Backlinks Master. It's been very reliable for checking the anchor text for the first 1000 links of a competitor. I find it's most effective using yahoo to find links, for this you'll need to signup for a yahoo ID and input it into the tool. As for getting more links. 2 popular methods are directory links and paid ones. Your other option is to get creative and come up with some other ideas for gaining links and experiment with them on other less important sites. Here's 2 things I'm currently testing: *The effect of gathering links using website or wordpress templates. *The effect of gathering links through link laundering sites. I'd say that a 1000 link with the text "hypnotherapy" would be overkill - use backlinks master to find out how many the other 3 sites have containing "hypnotherapy" and that'll give you some idea. Also be aware that 1000 identical links would probably trigger googles spam detection and get your website a ranking penalty. Build up your links on a day by day basis and see what happens to your rank, if you see a ranking decrease more than 10 in a single day you'll have probably triggered a penalty. To really understand what your limits are it's best to experiment on a less important site first, then move onto your main one.