dbEasy Ranked #1 in Google

I’m so excited!  I checked Google today and our new page is now the #1 ranked site in Google Search results when you search for the full page meta-title:

“online form and survey builder tool lets you create web forms for registration, satisfaction surveys, poll, and questionnaires.”

We are now ahead of Survey Monkey and FreeOnlineSurveys.com for this particular search phrase.

If you remember from my post, Use Keyword Analytics to calculate the most profitable keywords, this long phrase was carefully calculated as a composite of  several terms that Google Keyword Analytics identified as having the low competition and a high number of monthly searches:

1. online registration
2. online forms
3. web form
4. create forms
5. online surveys
6. form builder
7. satisfaction survey
8. online poll
9. survey tool
10. online questionnaires

When I do Google searches with these shorter phrases I did not find the dbEasy.com page at in the first 10 pages of search results.

Google Search Operator: Site

I know that my page is listed somewhere in Google for each of these search terms because I can do a site specific search for each one, like this:

site:dbeasy.com online registration

My dbEasy “Online Form and Survey Builder Tool” page comes up first for each of the terms.  However, without the site:dbeasy.com filter they are buried deep in Google’s database.

This is an example of the difference between a long-tail search and a short-tail search.  I will cover how to take advantage of the long-tail in a future post.

Page Headings in Google Search

dbEasy is on the first page (#3 overall) of the search results for first heading on the page:

online form and survey builder tool

It also ranks in the first three pages for two of the sub-headings on the page.  This proves that the headings and sub-headings of your web page do carry weight in search rankings.

Unfortunately the terms where our dbEasy page ranks high are not ones that get a lot of traffic.  According to the Google Keyword Tool they do not even have a count of monthly searches for , “online form and survey builder tool.”  It just shows “-” for monthly searches.

The shorter terms, on the other hand, do get a countable number of searches.  The 10 terms above have a total traffic of 3.8 million searches.

Improved Ranking for Shorter Terms

What we have learned is that trying to create one page that ranks high on multiple search terms is not that effective.  It would be better to create one web page that is optimized for each search term and link them all to the same call-to-action page.  I can also have them doubly linked with my composite page to increase the overall Page Rank.

By doubly linked I mean that the composite page will have links to each of the ten targeted search term pages, and each of them will have links back to the composite page, creating a two-way, or double link.  All eleven pages will be linked to the dbEasy call-to-action page, “Get Started Now,” which takes the traffic to the next step: turning visitors into prospects.

I have been able to get one web page  ranked #1 for a short search term.  My personal page, RayWampler.com, is ranked #1 in Google search results when you search for  “Ray Wampler.”  I can follow the same steps to get better rankings for each of the high-traffic terms above be making sure the exact search term appears in:

• The page name (URL)
• The page title
• The main heading (H1)
• The meta keywords tag
• The meta description tag
• The text of inbound links

Use Search Terms Consistently

When I create URLs for my single-term pages I’m going to use dashes instead of underscores because the Google webmaster blog tells us that it has a slight advantage.  So I have a page for each of the 10 search terms.  For example:

online-registration.aspx

That would be the page for the search phrase, “online registration.”  The title and main heading would be exactly the same as the search phrase.

On the on the first page, the Online Form and Survey Builder, where we have links to each of targeted pages, we make sure that the link text is also exactly the same as the search term we are targeting.  That gives us a good score with Google when it sees all these elements being consistent it means that this must be what the page is about.

Less Important Ranking Factors Still Need Attention

The keywords are not as relevant for Google ranking since these have been so abused by black hat SEOs.  But the keywords do have some weight, so we do need to have something in the keywords meta tag.  We could have just single search term we’re optimizing for, or we can include our targeted search term plus a few of the others.

The description is also not used so much in ranking by Google, but remember that it is what Google displays in the search results page.  Therefore your description is what the searchers when they review the search results and this is your only opportunity to get the searchers to select your page out of all the other search results and click on it.  Even if your page is ranked #1 in Google search, it will do you no good at all unless people click and visit your site.  The page description is your one shot to convince them.

Here is the description I have for “online registration” as it appears in Google search results:

Online Registration – dbEasy
http://www.dbeasy.com/dbeasy/Products/online…/online–registration.aspx‎
dbEasy lets you quickly create Online Registration forms for classes, events,
seminars, conferences.    Get started for free, be online in minutes.

This example shows a call to action that communicates benefits to the searcher, yet it is succinct enough to fit into Google’s limit of two lines.

Create Unique Content for Each Search Term

For each page we need to add unique content focused on the keyword phrase.  We would not want to copy the same content for each of the keyword phrases because Google penalizes you for duplicate content.  Each of the keyword phrases that we selected to target is different and we can think up unique content for each.  For example, two of the search terms are similar:

• online surveys
• satisfaction survey

So as to create unique content I took two different approaches.  The “online survey” page covers all the different uses for an online survey, whereas the “satisfaction survey” page talks about the questions you should put on your satisfaction survey.

I did the same the for the other 8 pages so now for each of the ten targeted key words I have unique content.

In the next post we will work on the final element for Google ranking: inbound links.