Most webmasters go totally "gaga" for top 10 rankings in Google. And for good reason, Google is the most dominant search engine on the net and will deliver the largest amount of traffic.

Even those webmasters who are fortunate enough to get No. 1 rankings for their keywords in all the three major search engines will tell you Google is the one that will deliver the majority of their traffic. Hands down.

More importantly, those same webmasters will also inform you, getting top 10 rankings in Google often means your site will prove profitable. Mainly because obtaining targeted traffic is usually your first obstacle in creating a viable online business. In other words, if you get top ten listings in Google for good searchable keywords, it is almost impossible not to earn money.

How To Proceed?

First, you must know the rudimentary basics of how keywords work. Keywords and keyword phrases are the exact words someone types into a search engine to find what they're looking for online. If you have a site on "dog training" then your goal is to get a top 10 ranking for the keywords "dog training".

Now if no one searches for "dog training" it would be a useless keyword, you would get no traffic no matter how perfectly your site is optimized for that keyword.

How Do You Know If A Keyword Is Good?

To find out, you have to do some keyword research on your particular keywords. Many professional online marketers use keyword research software like Brad Callen's Keyword Elite. However, you can also use the keyword suggestion tools supplied by Google Adwords or Overture. Try here:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

Now if you check "dog training", you will find it receives around 4,469 searches each day. That's a lot of traffic but you must realize that it may be too good, or rather too competitive for your purposes, especially if have a new site.

Biggest Mistake When Choosing Keywords

The most common mistake most novice webmasters make is targeting keywords which are too competitive. You simply will not be able to compete or place for extremely competitive keywords. Well established sites and businesses with very deep pockets have the resources to completely dominate those keywords.

While it is not entirely futile nor a waste of time to concentrate your efforts on highly competitive keywords, you will have better success if you target low to medium competitive keywords.

Long Tail Keyword Marketing

Besides online marketers have discovered that longer keyword phrases are usually the most lucrative. These phrases deliver traffic which is better targeted and more likely to convert into a sale. "Dog hunting training" which gets around 100 searches a day will be more targeted than the general term "dog training" and if you have a site devoted to training hunting dogs then this keyword phrase may convert better for you.

Always keep this "Long Tail" keyword strategy in the back of your mind as you implement the following steps to achieve your own Top 10 Rankings in Google.

1. Make A Master Keyword List

Your first step is to make a master list of the keywords you wish to target. Obviously these should be closely related to the theme of your site. As you can see from the example above, it is best to choose low to medium competitive keywords. Check the keyword competition by seeing how many sites are listed in Google for that keyword. Webmasters also check the Google PageRank of the sites that hold the top 10 positions. If all those sites are PR6 and above it may be hard to get ranked high for your keywords.

2. Choose Related Keywords

Once you have your master list of keywords, find long tail related keywords to target. Again, check out the competition and daily searches made for each chosen keyword.

3. Use Quality Content For Your Keywords

Creating quality content should always be your main goal. Write for actual visitors who will see and read your content. First and foremost you must have good useful content that your visitors will use themselves and recommend to their friends or colleagues. Tie this quality content in with your chosen keywords. Use one keyword phrase per page.

4. Use Keyword In Domain Name, Title And URLs

Having your keyword in your domain name will score big points from search engines. Plus, each page of content should contain your keywords in the title & meta tags for that page. Most experts also suggest you have your keyword in the URL and use hyphens to separate your keywords. Although the author has gotten good results by using an underscore and htm in URLs. Example: www.yoursite.com/your_keyword.htm

5. Do On Page Optimization

Keyword ratio is a much discussed topic by SEO experts and many suggest you should have your keyword in the H1 or headline title of your page. Sprinkle your keyword and variations of it throughout your page. Don't over do it but make sure the robot/spiders will clearly discover what your page is about. Many webmasters make sure they include their main keyword in the first and last 25 words on their pages.

6. Use Traffic Modules

One technique that works extremely well in Google is clustering a closely related topic or subject into a distinct separate section on your site. For example, if you have a marketing site, you could create a whole section on article marketing where you would have 50 to 100 keyworded pages all relating to your subject. Writing articles, formatting articles, submitting articles, article software... place a keyword linked menu on each page to connect all your pages together.

Keep in mind, your main objective is to supply quality information to your visitors. One reason Google may favor this type of structure is because they want quality content returned in their SERPs.

7. Try Article Marketing

Article marketing is writing short informative articles on keyword topics related to your sites. You then submit these helpful keyworded articles to ezine directories on the web, when your articles are picked up by related sites you receive quality One-Way links. The higher the quality of your article, the more links you will receive.

Another ranking tactic to use, if you're just starting out your site will probably have a low PR rank and you will find it hard to rank for even modest keywords. That's why it's useful to take advantage of the higher PageRank of the major ezine directories. Your keyworded articles on these high PR sites will get picked up by Google and displayed in the top 10 rankings. Now the displayed URL will be the article directory site but the links in the resource box will be pointing back to your site. Over time this article marketing technique will raise your own site's rankings for those keywords. Simple but effective.

8. Anchor Text And One Way Links

Off page optimization is important in obtaining high rankings in Google. Getting quality One-Way links is very important. Anchor Text simply refers to "the underlined clicked on words" in your links. Most webmasters include their keywords in their anchor text as this tells the search engines exactly what the links are about.

9. Tags, Blogging And Web 2.0

Take advantage of Web 2.0 by using blogs, RSS feeds and the social bookmarking sites like Reddit and Digg. Try AddThis.com for a simple social bookmarking system. At the very least your site should have a blog and RSS feed attached to it as this is an effective way of boosting your keyword rankings.

Tags have become very important for getting higher rankings. Keep in mind, in free blogging software such as WordPress, categories will automatically be seen as tags. Blogger, which is owned by Google, now has a form where you put your keywords (tags) for each post you make.

10. PPC vs Organic Search

Of course, one of the fastest ways to get your links displayed on Google is to pay for them by using Google Adwords. Your ad and links will sit side by side with the organic link results. In Pay Per Click advertising you bid or pay so much per click for your keywords and you only pay when someone clicks your links. But smart marketers also know since you're getting millions of impressions advertising your products, acquiring name recognition and branding through PPC advertising can be a major side-benefit.

However, most webmasters would say that organic links (SERPS) will return better traffic than paid links or advertising. In most cases, this may be true because Google's organic rankings are becoming more respected and more trusted by users. They simply carry more weight with surfers.

This makes it even more beneficial to obtain top 10 rankings for your keywords in Google. Depending on the competitiveness of your chosen keywords reaching the first page listing or even the favored number one spot is well within any webmaster's reach. Just go for it. The rewards are well worth your efforts.

In the past few years the SEO contests are popping up in the search engine optimization world like crazy. There are always contests running, and everytime there is a prize to win, sometimes a big one, sometimes a small one. But it doesn't matter in what contest you're participating, you will allways find things that have gone wrong, or could've done better. In this article I point out the top 10 most common mistakes in participating in an SEO contest.

1) The first mistake is the fact that webmasters get so excited when they see a lot of money, that they point links to their contest page from all the pages of their already existing websites. You would have thousands of backlinks in just a few days, which would cause a sandbox penalty. You need to remember that you can allways point those links to your contest page, you are not in a hurry, are you?

2) The second mistake is that people don't plan. You have to make yourself a scheme where you write down what you do every day/week. Make a linkbuilding scheme, a content writing scheme etc. Just make sure that you do what you tell yourself to do.

3) Make short term goals, the long term goal is offcourse the winning of the SEO contest. But if you make short term goals you don't get demotivated and you have offcourse more chance of winning the SEO contest. For example doing 5 article submissions, 40 link directory submissions and write 20 quality pages by the end of may. Or make a goal like this: I will be indexed by the first of may. Or, I will be on the third page in week 5 of the contest.

4) Write content, A lot of people start a contest blog, but they forget to write content. In the beginning you often write a lot of posts, but in the long run you get more focused on backlinks. Remember that content is still king. And if you have it, and others don't, you already have a head start.

5) Quality backlinks over crappy backlinks. A lot of people start by searching for easy backlinks like directories and buying high pagerank links, but you can do that any time you want in the contest. Do that half way, you have all the time! The first thing you do in participating in an SEO contest is writing content and finding topic related backlinks. The crappy backlinks can wait. You are not in a hurry!

6) Article submission, it's easy and really effective, this article is actually written to boost my ranking for the pvmultimedia seo contest. If I wasn't participating, this article would've never been written. The good thing with article submission is that you can decide what the article is about. So in some way you control the onsite optimization of your backlink, so you can make yourself a highly onpage optimized quality backlink that is related to your contest page. You can also use the main contest keyword as much as you like, so right now I'll take the opportunity to use the words pvmultimedia seo contest once more if you don't mind :).

7) Onsite optimization, don't do it!!! Why? very simple, if you can rank yourself to the top without using for instance your main keywords in your title, you have a backup plan, namely your onpage optimization. A few weeks before the contest you can highly optimize your website for the main keyphrase to get a good boost that can get you to the top, or if you already are at the first spot, you made yourself a really more solid position. And onpage optimization is something you can manipulate and control, offpage optimization is a component that can't be manipulated quickly. But make sure you don't overdo your onpage optimization in the end, because that could cause a penalty or even a ban.

8) Old and wise. If you have a question, would you ask an old wise man or a little boy? Probably the old man, right? Search engines think the same. If a website is new it is less valuable than if there is an old website/domain about the same topic. So stop registering new domains for your contest websites, just use an old one, or a subdomain of an old domain. Maybe you won't have the perfect url, but you do have the perfect age to take advantage from.

9) Authority, like I said before, I'm participating in the pvmultimedia seo contest. On dutch forums there was some discussion about how the hell it was possible that the top 10 for pvmultimedia seo contest was dominated by blogspot blogs. Well, because blogspot is an authority domain, even owned by google itself. Use that authority if you can. Or if you have yourself an authority website it's even better to use that website.

10) Analyse other participants, most people don't look at other participating websites. But if you do take a look at them you can actually find out how they're getting links, how many links they get in a specific period of time, from what websites the links are from, are the links quality topic related high pagerank links? How can I get those links? What do they do with their onpage optimization? etc...

So in fact there are many things you can do or must not do in order to get a chance to win an SEO contest. One last tip from me: start small, if you can win a small/local SEO contest with a small price, you can later on participate in the bigass SEO contests and become rich...