“Google” – That’s the name of the SEO game, isn’t it?

If you can get to the top of Google searches, you’re going to be raking in clicks, impressions and money. The entire SEO industry is built around how to get to the top of Google so that the most people see what you have to say. Are you getting your articles to the top of Google searches? Or are you getting buried in the lower pages that nobody ever even sees?

Want proof that I know how to get to the top of Google searches?

How did YOU find this article?

I’m going to walk you, step by step, through what I did to get THIS article to the top of Google searches, and how to use those tools to get any article YOU write there too, just like all of these articles I’ve gotten to the top of Google.

I’m going to walk you, step by step, through what I did to get THIS article to the top of Google searches, and how to use those tools to get any article YOU write there too.

Just follow my 5 easy steps:

STEP 1: KEYWORD RESEARCH

This part is so key, it’s right there in the name!

You have to know what people are searching for before you start to write, else you’ll miss your audience.

The first thing you should do is download a Chrome extension called “Keyword Everywhere“.

That’s going to show you search volume, cost per click & competition data for any keyword you can think of.

So, I have that extension, and I go to Google and I search for “how to get to the top of google” because that’s what I want to write about.

Right at the top, I can see the Volume (590/mo) | Cost Per Click ($6.47) | Competition (.31).

I then scroll down to the “searches related to…” to see what keywords people are searching for that are similar to the keyword I entered.

These are called LSI, or Latent Semantic Indexing, Keywords. These are the keywords that Google feels are most closely related to the keyword I searched for.

And guess what?

Because Google things that, if I include THOSE keywords into my article, Google is going to rank my article up higher when people search for my keyword.

So, I can see that:

• 320 people per month are searching for “how to get to the top of google without paying”
• 320 people per month are searching for “how to get to the top of google search results”, and
• 480 people per month are searching for “how to get your website on google first page”.

Knowing this I’d make sure to include those keywords into my article and the Google LSI is going to rank it higher when people search for “how to get to the top of google”.

Now this of course works for everything!

If you were writing an article about, for example, “The best vacuum to buy” in an attempt to build an authority site that will generate some affiliate revenue, you would search for “best vacuum to buy” and see that while that only has 480 searches/month, “best canister vacuum has 8100/month, “best vacuum cleaner for pet hair” has 4400, and “best upright vacuum cleaner” has 3600.

So now not only do you know the related keywords to include in your article, you know how to focus your article.

You know what people are searching for, so you need to write specifically for those topics.

You can write about vacuums in general, but you NEED to have specific sections about the best vacuums for pet hair, the best upright vacuums, and the best canister vacuums because that’s what’s going to drive the most people to read your article.

STEP 2: COMPETITION RESEARCH

Now that you know what you’re going to write about, and you know what keywords you need to include in your article.

Now it’s time to spy on your competitors to see what kind of content they are writing about your focus keyword. I know it sounds like secret spy stuff, but it’s actually fairly straightforward and a key component to topping Google searches.

The first thing you need to do is to search for your main keyword and look at the top 10 sites that come up. Those are your main competitors!

We need to figure out what they are doing to top the search list and more importantly what they aren’t doing that we can do to overtake them.

How do we do that?

First, we want to install the Moz Bar plug-in and log into our account on Moz.com.

Moz is going to show us stats on webpages…namely Page Authority and Domain Authority.

Domain Authority is on a scale of 1-100.  1 means they’ve barely strung two coherent sentences together and 100 means they’ve written the greatest article ever written about a specific subject in the history of the world.

We’re looking for two key numbers…30 and 60.

If you see any site on the first page of Google with a DA score of under 30, it’s going to be super easy to overtake that page with a little bit of effort.

This is a great sign!

If, however, you see every page on the first page with a DA score of 60 or higher, it’s going to be super difficult to usurp any of them. That’s not to say it’s impossible, but they’ve got that specific market locked down tight. It’s best to go back to step one and think of another focus keyword.

Remember… this is why you are doing research on your keywords BEFORE you start to write your article!

When you actually write, you want your writing to be focused on the things that are going to make you money. You don’t want to put a ton of time, effort, and researching into an article just to realize that it’s going to cost you thousands of dollars and months of additional work just to get it to a place where it can start to be seen by people.

Now that you know you have a focus keyword that has open spots in the marketplace, open up 4-6 articles that appear on Page 1.

Read them!

Can you write better than these articles are written?

Can you add things to spice up your article that your competitors have a lack of, like pictures or infographics?

Can you go into deeper detail on the subject than your competitors?

This is called the Skyscraper Technique, and the basic gist of it is that you want to be the BIGGEST and the BEST out of all your competitors.

Your aim should be to write better content, have a better-looking page, and provide more value for your readers than all of your competitors.

A simple example of Skyscraper Technique would be to always write longer articles than any of your competitors. Bigger IS better!

The last thing you want to do is to figure out how many times you should use the keywords that you researched in Step 1.

The ideal keyword density for your focus keyword is going to be between .5-1.5%, based mainly on logic.

Is your keyword over three words long?

It’s going to read unnaturally if it’s used every 75 words.

Is your keyword a single word?

You should aim to use it as often as possible.

Keyword density is how Google knows what your article is about!

Once you know how often you want to be using your focus keyword, you can branch out and figure out around how often you should be using the LSI keywords based on the “keyword competition” metric given by keyword everywhere.

You’ll want to use a keyword density for these LSI keywords of around .2-.5%, but remember the key is to write a good article that’s informative and reads well.

A well written article that reads naturally with an LSI keyword density of .15% is going to make you so much more money than a poorly written article that reads like an ad with an LSI keyword density of .5%.

Why?

Because people will actually read it!

Also, as a fun bonus, you can use these LSI keywords as the focus keyword for your next few articles and interlink the two articles with the LSI keyword as an anchor text (text that’s a clickable hyperlink).

See how I plan my articles before actually writing them:

STEP 3: WRITE THE ARTICLE

Now comes the creative part. Time to write!

The introduction of your article is super crucial. You want to grab your readers and make them hungry to read the entire thing.

How?

Give them a problem! State the problem outright and then assure them that you have the solution to this problem. Scroll back up to the top of this article.  See how I told you the problem and informed you that I had the solution?

You also want to make sure that you are using the focus keyword in the first 50-100 words of the article.

By stating the problem and telling your audience that you have a solution, you are making the intro user-friendly and by using your focus keyword up front you are making the intro Google-friendly.

In the body of the article, you want to write in depth about your subject.

Your heading should include your Focus Keyword or an LSI keyword and you should sprinkle those keywords in, where appropriate, in the rest of the article.

You’ll want to use “I” and “You” throughout the article to create a connection with your audience…unless you’re trying to sell textbooks, you want a conversational feel with your readers.

Remember, this is supposed to be easy and fun for them, something that informs and educates them.

They could go anywhere else for this information, but they chose you. Reward them for that with easy to follow knowledge!

When you use your LSI keywords, make them stand out. Bold/Italicize/Underline/Anchor text them. Use images and videos to make your words come alive and add to the enjoyable atmosphere you are attempting to cultive.

When it’s time to wrap up your article, make sure you get your focus keyword in one last time and end with a call to action for your reader.

Encourage them to put your words into action and be a fluid part of the process.

If you’re new to content writing, these content writing tips for beginners will help you writing eye-catching content.

STEP 4: ON-SITE SEO

Read back through the article you wrote and clean it up. Make sure your focus keyword is included in the first paragraph AND in the title tag.

Make everything SHORT.

Attention spans are SHORT so your content needs to be SHORT and EXPLOSIVE so that people will enjoy reading and can conceptualize what you are telling them.

Make your paragraphs and sentences as short and impactful as you possibly can.

Utilize font techniques like bold, italics, and underlining, but switch it up.

Don’t B/I/U the same word or phrase over and over again. Make sure you B/I/U your LSI keywords!

Utilize your header tags to maximize your article’s placement on Google.

Use ONLY ONE H1 tag.

Use your H2, H3, and H4 tags for your focus keyword and LSI keywords.

Interlink your new content from older content of your blog.

Try to use 2-5 interlinkings per article, and make sure you are using relevant anchor texts.

Make the LSI keyword a hyperlink and send users to other content on your blog.

Throw in images, graphics, charts, infographics, cartoons, any sort of picture to brighten up your article and bring your words to life.

Make sure you are using alt text for each image you upload. Make sure you compress each image to a low size so that your page loads fast for everyone who is trying to access it.

Make a YouTube video of yourself discussing the content. This can be a “preview” or a “review”, just summing up your main points and touching on everything briefly. Embed this video at the top of your article and it’ll give your content a quick SEO boost.

In the “tag” section in your CMS, add your focus keyword and LSI keywords.

Use your focus keyword in the permalink. Keep the permalink as short as possible and don’t use numbers in it. When you are titling your article, use your focus keyword in H1, keep the title length around 50 characters, use power words, and try to start the title with “how to” or with numbers.

STEP 5: LINK BUILDING

At this point, you’ve published your content.

So, the very first thing you’ll want to do is to get it indexed. Go to “Google URL Submitter Tool” and the first box at the top will be where you can submit the URL of your newly published article and google will immediately crawl the page and start indexing it in searches.

This will speed up your publishing process by 3-4 days.

Once it’s in Google’s system, share a link to your article on all of your social media sites.  Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Reddit, StumbleUpon, every place where other people are reading what you are writing.

On LinkedIn, you have the ability to submit articles, so this is a good spot to copy a couple of paragraphs that you wrote, submit them as an article, and at the bottom link back to your full article. This technique is also good on medium.com.

If you want to automate this process, you can use a tool called Only Wire.  They offer packages to automatically share content you publish to up to 50 social networking sites for a $10 fee.

Before you go crazy with link building here’s my suggestion: DO NOT make link building a NEED, rather make it a HABIT. If you’ve created content that’s valuable, people are going to link to it.  Because they LOVE IT! The only thing you need to do is to get the word out so people can know about your value-laden content.

While paid services like Out Brain, Buzz Stream, Taboola, and Contently can be great platforms for your content to be discovered by thousands of hungry readers out there, here’s a FREE way to get good number of eyeballs to your content:

The Outreach Method.

All you have to do is reach out to bloggers in your niche (emails or social network messages work the best) to let them know about your amazing content and encourage them to share your content with their audience.

It’s SUPER EFFECTIVE.

You can use this proven email template by Dean Brian for your outreach campaign:

Hi [First Name],

I was looking for content on [Topic] today, when I stumbled on your article: [Article Title].

Good stuff! I especially enjoyed [Something specific from their article].

Also, I just published a new guide on [Your Topic]: [URL].

As someone that writes about [Topic], I thought you’d enjoy it.

My guide may also make a nice addition to your page. Either way, keep up the awesome work with [Website]!

Talk Soon,

[Your Name]

You can build approximately 4-5 links per 100 outreach emails sent!

Remember, DO NOT make link building a Need, but make it a HABIT.  By getting into a habit of sending these outreach emails out regularly, you’ll build a network that relies on YOU to supplement their content.  And in return they are giving you ALL of their traffic!

This strategy can help you easily build 15-20 links a month, and these links are going to be high quality links that funnel a target audience to your content.

Conclusion

Getting your article to the first page of Google can be super easy if you follow the right strategy. This 5-step strategy (Keyword Research > Competition Research > Content Writing > On-Site SEO > Link Building) is a proven technique that will allow anyone to get to the top of Google. Follow it thoroughly and work hard on both your content and link building techniques and you’ll soon see YOUR content at the top of many Google searches.

The post How to Get Any Article to the First Page of Google appeared first on Earn With Anish.