How to Get Ranked for Your Website Name - Easy and Fast
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There’s a lot of advice out there on how to get ranked for some competitive
keyword terms (like weight loss, credit cards and so on). What about ranking
first for your websites name (if you have a new site)? If you have a domain
named 2ndwebdesigner.com, that doesn’t mean you’ll be #1 for
’2ndwebdesigner’ or ’2nd web designer’ immediately!
Why?
We will try to explain that also we will explain how you can get ranked for
your website name.
Put in rough terms, Google ranks websites using 2 criteria:
- Relevancy
- Authority
Relevancy
Example: If you try to rank #1 for ‘wedding flowers’ and have a page on your
site for that term, Google will try to use several criteria to determine how
relevant your page is for people that use that keyword ‘wedding flowers’ (or
variations) and rank you accordingly.
Nobody knows all the factors Google uses to determine how relevant a page is
for a specific keyword. The best type of evidence we got so far is 1)
correlation evidence 2) making your own index of the web and trying to match
it with Google’ index. A lot of resources are required to do both of those
things (dedicated servers etc.)
Fortunately, for us, there are a few good companies that do this like
Moz
who constantly find correlation data and make various compartments. Their
latest on relevancy is the LDA. It’s a very complex algorithm and it is
suspected Google uses some variation of it in order to determine how
relevant a page is for a specific keyword.
But in your case, you just want to get ranked for your website name. So the
fact that your URL (2ndwebdesigner.com in this example) matches the keyword
’2ndwebdesigner or ’2nd web designer’ tells Google that your homepage is
EXTREMELY relevant for those keywords Put in simple terms, a navigational
queries is a keyword you type when you’re looking for a specific site, like
Microsoft, or 800 Flowers.
Authority
This is where you need to focus on if you want to rank for your
websites name. The primary reason why Google is not ranking you for your
name is because you have no (or very little) links. Authority =
links, put in rough terms.
Now, I wish things were that simple :) Authority = links, so go and get more
links, right? Yes and no.
Yes, you need to get more links but if all of those links are from 1 unique
root domain*, then your ‘authority’ is limited.
*unique root domain = a domain from 1 root URL. For example, if you get a
link from a page on yahoo.com, then that’s 1 unique root domain. If you get
a page from news.yahoo.com (a subdomain) that still counts as 1 root domain.
If you get links from a page on cnn.com, bbc.com and news.cnn.com that’s 2
unique root domains.
Okay, why do links from unique root domains matter? Because
search engines most probably use them
as one of the major ranking factors. It is one of the hardest things to
manipulate. You can easily get 300 links from 1 domain, but what about 300
links from 300 domains? It would take 10x, maybe 100x more time. Speaking
generally, the harder a link is to get, the more valuable it is.
How to build ‘authority’ in the eyes of the search engines
We now know that we need links from a diverse number of domains in order to
build authority in the eyes of the search engines. Now the hard part
comes…where to get links from? To get ranked for your websites name, you can
get started by submitting your site on some simple social bookmarking sites.
You can submit your site on,
There are many more…but I found these are a) reputable b) high authority.
Do a guest post
Know someone who owns a blog? Ask him for a guest post and add a link to your site at the end of the article. This should help a lot, especially if your friend’s site has some popularity. You can also ask strangers who have blogs to do a guest post for them, nowadays writing guest posts is a very hot topic.
Explore more link building methods
There are so many link building methods out there, it’s impossible to explore them in one step.
Please avoid doing black hat methods at any cost. Especially at the beginning. By black hat I mean doing things like buying links.
I would define buying links as DIRECTLY exchanging money for a link without any editorial control in the process. Buying link building services is NOT buying links because a) there’s an editorial control to check whether your site is family-friendly and b) you’re not exchanging money for links directly, you’re exchanging your money for some other persons’ TIME.
That person will then use his time to go to websites that provide links for free and get them. You could easily obtain those links as well without any money investment.
Start lowly
If you’re not doing anything black hat (like using a software tool to blast 100.000 links in a day, which is obviously a way to game the search engines), you should be fine. I’m pretty careful with any new site I build and try to rank it first for its NAME.
I’ve seen so many people who haven’t ranked their sites for their names and they go for phrases like ‘coding blog’ or whatever. In our example, you first want to be #1 for ’2ndwebdesigner’ for ’2ndwebdesigner’ and ’2nd web designer’ before going for terms like ‘webdesign blog’ or a ‘design blog’.
What about getting those links naturally?
You can do that as well! (actually search engines prefer you get natural links above all other types). If your site/page gets popular on Digg, StumbleUpon then you’ll get a bunch of natural links and you should rank for your websites name pretty fast.
So that is an option too. Although I’m noticing that people who link naturally are migrating to Facebook/Twitter and search engines haven’t catched up yet (they need to give more weight to links from different profiles from Facebook and Twitter).