Hi all. I'm relatively new to posting on the forum, and thought I would kick things off by talking a little about my process for ranking client sites in Google- a process that has worked for me time and time again. I'm going to be talking you through my on-page tactics, as well as how I am acquiring links right now, but first; a little about me. I have been in SEO since I was 17, after dropping out of college to work at my mum's Internet marketing agency. Four years later, I've worked in a couple of different agencies, and now work for myself. The one thing that shocks me is how little SEO agencies really understand about SEO, it seems that the people that really know what they are doing earn more working for themselves which leave agencies with very little talent and expertise to get the job as well as some of the one-man SEO's out there. I am going to talk you through how I rank a site if I am trying to rank only the home page on the site just to keep things simple to understand. It doesn't really matter if you are ranking multiple pages, just use your brain to adjust the strategy to fit whatever you are trying to achieve. Let's jump into my process anyway. Let's get into link building first of all since this is what everybody want to hear about first. Link Building My link building strategy has a private blog network at its core. I’m not going to go into extensive detail for how I build this network, because it would take me far too long. But let me break it down for you. Every single SEO that I know of that is making 10k+month+ is using a private blog network. With no exception. Private blog networks absolutely kill it and when you take the correct precautions to hide your tracks, Google can’t spot it. For those of you that don’t know, a private blog network is a network of sites that you personally own and use to build links to your own sites. Every day, hundreds of old domains are expiring. Various business went under, or people simply got fed up of running them. The thing is, many of these domains have a great deal of power and link juice flowing through them. When people fail to renew these domains, they go up for auction and you can take control and repurpose them. I invested around 5k into taking control of a whole bunch of sites, and repurposed them to match the niches of my client sites. Then, I link out to my client sites from them. Using my network, I can achieve front-page rankings in anywhere from 5-30 days, depending on the competition. As well as using my private blog network, I do a few other things. First of all, I diversify my anchor text with a tool called socialadr. Essentially, it builds social bookmarks for me and I use different anchor text to my money keywords to avoid a penalty. Secondly, I use a tool called Syndwire to build a variety of social signals and links from various properties. I also use this tool to power up the strength of my private blog network. Thirdly, I will build all of the key social media properties like a facebook page and a youtube channel for the client, and ensure that I have links pointing to my client site from them. These social properties are essential to sending waves of trust to Google. Finally, If this is a local client and I am aiming to rank in the 7 pack, I will build citations. With harder keywords, I might do a few other things like get some press releases or some high-powered guest posts built, but I outsource this as and when I need it. Let’s jump into on-page now. On-Site Optimisation I place my target keywords naturally in the title tag (as close to the front of the title tag as possible), as well as the description tag. The description tag is far less important for ranking (most argue it carries no weight), but I still like to include my keywords there because they will appear bolded and increase click through rate as a result. On the home page content itself; I aim for a minimum of 1000 words of content surrounding the topic of the target keywords. Again, my keywords are placed naturally throughout the content. I use Headers (h1 + h2 + h3 tags), naturally containing my target keywords. It is very important that your target keywords are in the headers and placed throughout the content itself. Note the importance of a word that I used multiple times in the past few paragraphs: 'naturally'. It was deliberate because I want to drum a key lesson into you, something that is essential to avoiding a penalty on your site. Gone are the days when stuffing your keywords into your site would benefit you. It now hurts you. So make sure you are mixing it up and using variations of your target keyword. Try not to repeat words, whilst at the same time ensuring that you sprinkle your target keywords into your site. Just use your brain to make sure you are not blatantly slamming the same keyword into every place possible. Don’t get hung up on old school tactics like keeping to a certain keyword density percentage. Just write your content and tags for your target market whilst at the same time making sure that Google knows your site is about the keywords that you are trying to rank for. Another key thing I do with the home page is make sure that there is rich media on it, which means images and video. Quite simply, any site that has rich media on it has a higher perceived value to Google, and has a better chance of ranking. It’s really as simple as that. Again, I naturally include my keywords in the titles of the images and video, as well as the alt tag of the images. That’s the home page itself covered. Often, what I like to do is create what is called a silo to link back to this hope page. Basically, what I do is create 5-10 posts on the site itself, which are about the topic of the target keyword. Within these posts I will link back to the home page. This gives Google loads more content surrounding the topic of the target keyword. The fact that all of this content is linking back to the home page also sends a massive trust signal to Google. That pretty much covers what I do when it comes to on-site. My tactics change when I am trying to rank multiple pages on the site but hopefully you get an understanding of my approach. I hope you took something of value from this post!