One of the best methods for ranking a site is so obvious that you will kick yourself when you realize you haven’t been doing it.  The best way to get a site to rank for your targeted keywords is to use the link authority you already have and just realign its targeting.

So let me explain what I mean lets say I get contacted by CanadianFries.com and they want me to increase there rankings for the keyword “Canadian Poutine”.  Now I have gone and met this client and they realized that I am quite young which made them a little uncomfortable that I will be controlling thier online presence.  So I have agreed to a test run of their SEO campaign to get “Lightening fast speed rankings” to prove that I know what I am doing.  Lucky for me CanadianFries.com has been around since 2001 and they have a natural flow of about 10 links that are pointing into their site.

Here is the easiest part of SEO that is so simple but often gets overlooked and brings the fastest results.  All you have to do is analyze those backlinks using a backlink tool then sort it by pagerank (not the best metric to measure relevance but its better then nothing) actually better yet download the SEOMoz toolbar and use MozRank as the metric to measure the quality of your backlinks.  Now that you know who’s linking to you go to the website showing any pagerank or mozrank and go to their contact us section.  Find their email and quickly send off an email such as the following to them.

Hello Name or Website Name,

I am the Webmaster at Canadianfries.com  and I noticed your linking to our website on this page URL.  We are attempting to improve our rankings in the search engine’s and was wondering if you could do us a big favor.

Can you change your link to link to us with the text “Canadian Poutine” and point the link to this page http://www.canadianfries.com/poutine instead?

Thank you so much,

David Horne,

Web Developer - CanadianFries.com

Ok so the above email works great usually I see 70%-80% success with this sort of email.  Mostly because its honest and the people who are already linking to you are usually friendly with your site and more likely to reply.  Also something to note is many people will reply back with the request that you link back to them also if your not already doing so, so be prepared for that.

I was able to take a website from page 3 of the SERPS to page 1 in the 3rd position in 2 weeks with about 1 hour of work using this method for a decently competitive search term.  Also the good news is that this doesn’t trigger Google’s mass link increase filter because you already had all these links your just retargeting the link fuel.

IMPORTANT SIDE NOTE!!!!

One penalty to be concerned about here is over-optimizing your backlink profile.  This means that if all your links say “Canadian Poutine” you will probably get penalized you need to make it look natural have a few that just say “click here” or some that say “Poutine in Canada” mixing in variations of your keyword not only looks natural to the Search Engines but also helps you increase your reach across longtail search terms.

Tell me what you think of this method and if you agree or disagree that it is the fastest way to see quality rankings for competitive search terms.