Is it possible to be #1?

I am thinking about launching a site and I don't have much experience with SEO.  I was wondering how likely is it for a site to become the #1 search result on the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN)?  What are the most important factors for determning the likelihood of your site being #1?  Is this something I should worry about now before launching the site or is it something I can do later?  If a site ranks as #1, is it hard to maintain that after you have achieved it?

Content is king. Fresh (updated regularly) relevant content is the most important factor in rankings. There are things that can be done to optimize the code of the site, and while these steps are very important, without content, you will see no results.

The search engines scour your page looking at the text to see if it is relevant to a particular query. They will also look at who is linking to you. If you have great content on a specific topic, and other people find it and link to it from their websites, which also contain content that's relevant, things will start to work in your favor. Content creation is the best way to develop these inbound links.

Inbound links (when someone links to you, and you don't link back) are more valuable than link-swapping (or recipricol linking), because the give you more authority on a given topic in the eyes of the search engines.

Work specific search keywords into the text, but make sure it sounds natural. The idea is to write stuff that people will want to read. Not to try to rig the system in your favor by throwing up a bunch of keyword stuffed pages.

With all this said, it is possible to be #1 if you target specific and relevant keywords, as opposed to general ones, because there is less competition. This is definitely something I would start working on before you launch your site, and something that will require ongoing maintenance (monthly at the very least). The sooner that you start working on it, the sooner you will see results.

Ben,

I didn't realize there were other factors outside of what I can do on the site that increase rankings.  How do you go about getting people to link to you?  Is linking something that just has to happen naturally or are there services out there to help you with this?

Ben,

After reading your post again, I have another question.  How do you determine what are specific and relevant keywords?  How do I know if I am targeting competitive words?

Thanks,

Kelly

Kelly,

One of the best link building diagrams I have come across is one put out by prospect MX. You can view the chart here. (it is a pdf file) It pretty much covers all of the link building methods you can use.

As for determining the competitiveness of the keywords, you have to work on doing some keyword research. There are a lot of free and paid tools out there. Google Keyword Suggestion tool is ok - there is also wordtracker and keyword discovery tool. Those are good places to start because you can input keywords and see related words and their popularity. The more popular words are obviously harder to rank for due to the more competition so you really want to look niche keywords that will drive you traffic but have a realistic amount of competition.

Also, another way to gauge competition is to search for a few terms you want to target in google and the other SEs. Look at the number of results that are in the top right corner. The higher that number - the more work it will take to get to the top rankings.

I hope that helps.

Julia

Julia,

Wow, I never would have realized there were so many ways to do link building.  The chart you provided was very helpful.  Looks like I have a lot to get working on!

Also, the keyword tools you suggested will come in handy.  Before having this discussion I didn't realize that the content on a site was so important.  Hopefully I will be able to put these to good use and be on my way to having a high ranking site.

Kelly

One other thing that you also want to do is make sure that your site is readable to the search engines.  Try to make your site as HTML/XHTML compliant as possible.  You can use some scanners to check this to see what you might be able to change to make your site more readable - a great site for this is http://validator.w3.org

Also in designing your site you need to make sure that your text is visible.  Don't hide text to help with seo by placing it with the same color as the background as some search engines will actually penalize you for this hidden content.  Last but not least try running your site through a screen reader.  A screen reader is a tool for the blind that actually reads the text of the page to you.  If this is able to read the text to you easily, then odds are the search engine can see it too.  A tool that I use for this is a plugin for firefox called Fangs - this will just display the text that a screen reader can read so you can quickly see what is visible and what is not.

Hope these tips can help you with your site.

Joe

Everyone has so many helpful suggestions  There are so many things to take into consideration when creating a web site that I never would have thought of on my own.  I also never would have thought about being sneaky and hiding the text on the page.  Thank you for pointing it out as being a bad practice.  I may have come across it somewhere else and thought that it was a good idea.  Surely I would have regretted it later...

 Hi Ben! My name is Tim.  How often do you think a web site with banner and text links should be updated?  Would you say once a week? Once a day? Every other day? Every month? Good post.

 Joe! Thanks for  the validator address...I went there and found 77 errors and 2 warnings on my site! Is this normal or is my site whack? Most of the errors say stuff like this: Line 50, Column 78: document type does not allow element "H3" here; missing one of "APPLET", "OBJECT", "MAP", "IFRAME", "BUTTON" start-tag.  Do you know what my character encoding should be? utf-8? (it says that utf-8 is useful) Shall I fix all issues and revalidate or am I stretching here?.... Great information..Thank you very much.