How to rank on page 1 of Google

This guide is based on Mixergy’s course with Brian Horn.

Brian Horn saw that his client would miss out on millions in sales if he didn’t have a high search ranking, so he used SEO to skyrocket his ranking and generate $6 million in leads. It was all done using SEO tactics to improve search rankings, so we invited him to teach you how to do it.

Brian is the founder of On Page 1 Marketing, Inc., an SEO consulting and publishing company.

Here are the actionable highlights from the course.

1. Get visitors to interact to show Google that people engage with your site

Brian likes the design of Cracked.com because it makes people scroll down and click through to a second page to read a complete article, and that shows Google that the site’s content is interesting to readers.

Take Action:

Present your website content in the form of numbered lists with pictures so visitors have to scroll down to see it all, and break up articles into two pages so visitors have to click to see the rest of the article.

2. Send a press release so news sites will link to your blog posts

Brian sent out a press release for a blog post he wrote about what he learned from his son who has Down syndrome, and other websites picked up the press release and linked back to his blog, giving the post more credibility with Google.

Take Action:

A day or two after you write a blog post, use a free service like PRLog to send out a press release that includes a direct quote from the post and the URL.

3. Diversify your backlinks to protect your search ranking

Brian says that if websites had drawn backlinks from multiple sources, they would have been fine when Google stopped indexing blog networks, but some websites relied on blogs for all their backlinks so their search rankings fell.

Take Action:

Open an account with Majestic SEO to check where your backlinks come from, and try to get backlinks from additional sources like social media or wikis if most of your backlinks are from one site.

4. Automate blog comments so you can get more backlinks and higher traffic

Brian uses software to automatically post a large number of blog comments linking back to his sites, and this makes the sites appear more popular to search engines and increases traffic.

Take Action:

Sign up with BlogCommentDemon, enter keywords you want to target, and have the program find relevant blogs and automatically post comments on them linking back to your site.

5. Use social sharing to look important to search engines

Brian’s client’s site had fallen from the top of Google’s search results to page five, but after Brian promoted his home page and subpages with social media service SocialAdr, the site shot back up to the top of the rankings.

Take Action:

Create an account with a social media service like SocialAdr, and either pay for other people to share your site on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, or promote their sites in exchange for them promoting yours.

6. Stop using Google Analytics so Google won’t see all your SEO tricks

Brian found that SEO-optimized sites that didn’t use Google Analytics fared better in search rankings than comparable sites that did, so he’s removing all of his sites and his clients’ sites from Google Analytics and Google Webmaster.

Take Action:

Stop using Google Analytics, which could tip Google off to your SEO strategy and cause them to demote your site if they don’t like your tactics, and instead download an open-source analytics package like Piwik.

7. Put content on .edu sites so your backlinks will have instant authority

Brian inserted links to his sites in wikis built by students at Princeton and Yale, and these backlinks make his sites seem more credible to search engines.

Take Action:

Search for .edu sites that use MediaWiki, find old wikis that students are no longer using, and edit them by adding links to your sites.

8. Control suggested search terms so you can protect your site’s reputation

Brian found that Google was suggesting “Brian Horn scam” when people searched for his name, so he paid ShortTask workers to search for his name with different keywords until “scam” was dropped from the list of suggestions.

Take Action:

Type your site’s name into Google, and if it suggests any negative terms, pay workers on ShortTask or Amazon Mechanical Turk to search for your site with positive terms.

Written by Sarah Brodsky, based on production notes by Jeremy Weisz