Get lots of websites to link to you.

I would say it basically boils down to having better links to your site with the desired keyword phrase as the anchor text than your competitors.

By "better" I mean having more quantity of links than your competitors and also having more links from authoritative sites than your competitors.

There are a lot of other subtleties to consider although that's about as "non-fluffy" and garbage-less as I understand it.

Hope that helps.

Wendell

4 Things to note!


1. Get more Links than the others

2. Get better links from higher pr pages than them

3. Have more relevant text and keywords than their posts

4. Have more content than them


Forget anything else and work on these factors and you'll rank high if you work hard enough

No Fluff!


Cheers

Thanks to all for the posts!

1. Optimize the page title and description to include the keyword phrase.
2. Internally link that that specific page with the keyword you want it ranked for
3. Build backlinks focused on one particular keyword only per page until you rank for it, then mix in a little randomization.
4. Have a diverse list of incoming link sources (article directories, rss directories, bookmarks, blog comments, video submissions, press releases, link directories, forum signatures, web 2.0 properties such as squidoo.com and zimbio.com)
5. Once ranking, continue to add new content and grow your incoming links on average of about 1 a day or 30 a month.

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1. Use Keywords that people actually use for titles in your Blog Posts
2. Use a plug in to overwrite your Home Page Title and Description tag... All in one SEO will do this and so will others
3. Write naturally and include keywords specific to your article
4. Promote... get quality backlinks from Authority sites
5. Choose a professional blog design

That is what you can control. Things like domain age, how long people stay at your site, what they click on... you may only have partial control over.

You should be using an analytics program to see what people do on your site and for how long so you can make adjustments.

SEO is art and science. But it's really only as effective as you make it.

And if you don't know how to do effective keyword research you should stop and do that first. Look at all the popular keyword research tools... Spend a day watching all their tutorial videos.

Before I go and do something dumb, can anyone tell me if you can put two links with two different keywords pointing to the same website on one of Angela or Paul's backlink sites? Has anyone done that before?

1. Make sure you have included the keywords in your meta tag, meta description, keywords and title.
2. Make sure you are getting backlinks from other sites (Whitehat methods only)

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