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This is probably the most common question any webmaster will ask. This is also probably the greatest source of frustration especially when it comes to your money sites. Most people who ask this falls into the category of those who have worked hard and spend hours building content and backlinks all over the internet trying to rank well on the search engines (like me..)

The truth is trying to rank on the first page is HARDDD work.

UNLESS, very few people compete with you to rank.

Managing my niche sites have been a very educational experience even if I didn’t see it getting the success I wanted. I’ve talked about my methods here.

Niche Site Experiment – Keyword Research

Niche Site Experiment – Finding A Niche

How I do it now has changed slightly but the fundamentals behind it remain the same.

So why the heck are some of my sites not ranking well? This is what I’ve found out so far…

It Takes TIME

This is so true. When all the internet marketers talk about “pushing the button” , you should really run as far away as possible from them because there is no such thing as immediate results. Every Tom, Dick and Harry is using SEO, building backlinks and doing the same thing as you, so unless you don’t wanna work hard to get your site rank over the long haul, you won’t see results.

Expect up to 6 months or more in some cases to see you getting some decent traffic and page 1 rankings even with all your efforts put into creating backlinks and content. Some might say 3 months but I don’t see that happening with mine so far.

Even if it takes time, learn how to work smart. Check out this post on using the 80/20 method.

You should also learn how to outsource here. Follow my Tips on Outsourcing.

Ranking Criteria

The rules of the game have changed. If you wanna play the Google game, you have to live by their rules. The change in algorithms recently have led me to believe in a few things with some research done to back its findings.

Domain Age – I’ve discovered that domain age is an important part of rankings. For example when this blog started it did not rank well for quite a number of keyphrases but right now, it didn’t take much effort to find its way into the page 1 rankings for quite a number of posts. A lot of other SEO pros agree that Domain age is a factor in rankings so even if your site is in the top 500 rankings, wait a while and see if it changes, (although I wouldn’t recommend just waiting and hoping for it to happen.)

Backlink Building Consistency– Backlinks are an important part of any search engine ranking process. There are plenty of folks around who agree that your link building efforts have to be continuous and there is no way you can stop building links in the earlier stage of your website and hope for it to rank unless you don’t even want it to rank.  It has to be a continuous process especially for your money / niche sites. Consistency is the key if you expect good rankings. Diversity, relevance and authority should be part of your link building process.

Number don’t really matter although you need to continue building it. Instead of focusing on numbers you should focus on quality. Take a look at your own backlinks, are they primarily from article submission sites? (like most people do).

Backlink Diversity – What is Your Backlink Strategy? Is it fully concentrated on article marketing? Bear in mind that article marketing must not be your sole focus as it is generally recognized as LOW QUALITY in the eyes of search engines. If your backlinks are skewed towards article marketing you should start building links somewhere else too.  Blog commenting, social sharing sites, feed bookmarking, guest posting articles are some examples. Consider those even from .edu and .gov websites.

Another question to ask is are all your links build on roughly the same sort of domains? Links build on different domains and different countries can affect your rankings too. So don’t just focus on sites from US.

Spread your links to the entire world!

Is Your Site Loaded with Thin Content or Repeated Content?

This part is probably the most important thing you want to focus on. It is obvious that poorly written content, duplicated content or sites with little content will have trouble ranking.  If your site falls into this category, go and fix it right now. Don’t expect all the thousands of backlinks to help your site rank well.

>>>Take a look at this article on thin or no original content on Google Webmaster

It is much better to write content so good that people would want to link to you. My suggestion for every new site you create is to preload it with a number of good content for Google to crawl.  You should also take a look at this article on Google’s guidance on building high quality sites. It is a MUST read.

>>> Google’s Guidance on building high quality sites

You should also read some guidelines about building affiliate sites. With thousands of webpages showing the same thing, what can make your site better than the rest?

>>> Guidance On Affiliate Programs

Anyway, creating good content is hard but if this is your aim on every single article you write, you are sure to be linked by other sites. Strive to make all your content link worthy. Remember, Google ABSOLUTELY loves quality content so give it to Google! Even if no site links back to you, Google will want others to look at YOURS FIRST!

HTML/ Code Errors On Your Page?

Good clean code is another important ranking factor. That is why I chose to use THESIS. Even Matt Cutts use Thesis!

Point is, you should strive to keep your website as error free as possible. It is quite impossible to keep any site error free. Even mine here has quite a number of errors that I’m working on. The trouble with coding errors is that it can confuse or make life difficult for spider bots. You want them to find all your content easily. You also don’t want the spider bots to get lost crawling.

Want to find out if your site has clean code? Use this tool.

>>>W3C Markup Validation Service

I hope this has answered most of your ranking problems. Good Luck!

Tagged as: good clean code, link building, Search engine optimization, SEO, site ranking factors., site rankings, thin or duplicated content

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