Post your 3 best ways to rank well on Google

[chanel27]

Hi,

Anyone care to share what are your 3 best ways to rank well on Google?

As for me i think:

1.) Link building & Social Media

2.) Onsite optimization

3.) Quality Content

What about you?

[Horizon]

It's really hard to pin down three things, and all of my tips would cross over one another to some degree, but I'll wade in with mine anyway...

For me, it's roughly the same as yours, but perhaps my priorities would be slightly different:

1. Content. It's king. Write excellent quality, valuable content and people will want to share it socially, link to you from their website, and most importantly, users will read it and engage with it. This is the vast majority of your link building effort right here (which is why I won't include a bullet on link building).

2. Architecture, structure and on-page optimisation. If you have a good flat architecture that is technically structured, marked up well and geared towards SEO best practises, you will reap the benefits.

3. Analysis. To the point of being anal retentive. Probably one of the most little mentioned parts of an SEO's job is to analyse everything. See what your competitors are doing well, see what niches you can fit into, research your own market, analyse technical mistakes/improvements, analyse how users engage with your site, how they navigate, what they do when they're here, how they found you, how else they can find you, and so on. Good research means that you can gauge what you need to be doing better, what new things you should do, and when.

That's mine very much in a nutshell. I hope others will come along and share their's too.

Matt