Everyone trying to work their way up the search engine rankings will encounter the “Google dance” and the “Google slap” sooner or later.

The Google dance is the way your search engine results behave. One day you are ranking #8, the next day #7, and then the day after #15. Don’t worry. Just hang in there. No one’s climb to the top of the search engines is every smooth. There is a lot of two steps forward, one step back. My experience is that you almost always return to where you were before after a few days.

Happily, no.

It has been two weeks since Google rolled out their new algorithm for ranking websites. This new algorithm was designed to lower the ranking of low value-added websites, including the “content farms” known as article directories.

While article directories, including ezineArticles and Buzzle, have taken a major hit, I’m pleased to say that my sites have not been affected. Others who use a similar strategy that involve article marketing have said the same thing.

So in short: my secret formula still works. Article marketing is still an effective part of any strategy to climb up the Google rankings.

Google Doesn’t Want You to Know

I’m super excited about sharing with you my secret formula for climbing up the search engines.  If you found this website, then you’ll know that this strategy works!

I’ve spent about 3 weeks drafting this post, so if you have any feedback or questions, I’d love to hear from you. It’s a long read, so grab yourself a cup of coffee and settle in.

Google, Yahoo and Bing don’t want you to know what I am about to tell you.  In fact, neither does the internet marketing community.  Internet marketing experts will charge you thousands of dollars for the advice that I’m about to give you for free.  It took me months and a few thousand dollars in training to figure all this out for myself, and I hope this knowledge can help transform your online presence.

Now that we have our WordPress plug-ins installed, as we did in Step 5, we can now start creating content for the website.

Step 6- Create Content

Creating content involves two tasks: creating graphics; and, writing pages and posts.

Creating Graphics

LOGOS AND OTHER WEB DESIGN

A good looking website can go a long way, and graphics are at the heart of any good looking website.  Most of us have pretty basic design skills, and need outside help for our web graphics.  A fantastic place to turn is 99designs.  At 99designs, you make a list of what you want and set a price for what you would be willing to pay for a suitable graphic.  The community out there then submits, entirely at their own cost, designs to you.  You indicate which ones you like or dislike, and enter into a dialogue with any designers that have given you something with potential.  A few back and forths exchanging ideas and designs, and BINGO, you’ve got a winner.  You only pay IF you get a design that you like.

Now that we have WordPress installed, as we did in Step 4, there are a few WordPress settings that we need to adjust and install a few WordPress plug-ins so that our site is optimized for search engines.  Many WordPress plug-ins are free, and the 3 that I recommend below are all free.

Step 5- WordPress Settings & Plug-Ins

You are ready to start writing content for your website, but first, there are a few settings that we should adjust and plug-ins we should install.

All these fixes are designed to help your site rank higher in Google.  We are going to change one setting and install 3 plug-ins.

Settings

Go into your WordPress admin panel, and select Settings/Permalinks (see image below).

Under Common settings, choose Custom Structure and write in /%postname%/

This will give you readable URLs for your posts and pages, such as:

http://googleplacement.net/master-strategy-for-a-high-Google-placement

Once you’ve installed WordPress, as we did in Step 3, the next task is to install a WordPress theme.  Themes are essentially page design templates that give your website its unique look, or utilities that provide specific “under the hood” features to make your job as webmaster easier.  Let’s turn now to what is involved in installing a theme.

Step 4- Install a WordPress Theme

In choosing a specific WordPress theme for your website, you will want to choose a theme that provides a certain look, or which provides a set of required functionality.

There are a manyWordpress themes that you could use for your website, including a large number of free themes.  You can’t argue with the pricing of free  and there are a number of attractive ones to choose from.

We now have our domain activated, as outlined in Step 2.  The next step is to install some sort of website content management software, so that we can edit the site.

Step 3 – Install WordPress

I highly advise using WordPress as your website content management software.  I use WordPress, rather than any other website management software, because (1) it’s free, (2) there are a huge number of available WordPress plugs that you can activate later, to achieve pretty much any functionality for your website, and (3) it’s all cloud-based, so you will be able to update your website from any computer or smartphone that has internet access.

To use WordPress to edit your website, you need to install the WordPress software on your Godaddy web server for each of your domains.  This is a lot easier than it sounds, and you can do it by following the 9 steps below.

So you’ve registered a domain name and purchased web hosting.  Well done — you’ve taken the first step in setting up your own website.  If you missed it, you can learn how to do that in Step 1 of this 6-part tutorial.

Step 2 of this series will show you how to activate that website.

Step 2- Activate Your Domain

Once you have secured your domain and hosting services as described in Step 1, you need to tell your hosting company that you are ready to go live with you website.  We will walk through the process of activating your domain using GoDaddy.com.

1- To do this, open GoDaddy.com, and log in with the user name and password you created when you first set up your account with GoDaddy.

2- Click on the MY ACCOUNT/ACCOUNT STATEMENT button on the top right (see image below).

Everybody wants to be one the first page of Google.  But how do you do it?  It can be surprisingly easy.

Below, I will outline the basic strategy for getting a high Google placement.  I’ll delve into certain of these topics in more detail in subsequent posts.

1-  FIND THE RIGHT KEYWORDS

You need to start this process by asking yourself “first page for what?”  It seems a remarkably simple question, but not one that most people actually give any thought to.  The reality is that none of us are going to get on the first page for highly competitive search terms (“stop smoking”,”credit cards”, “iPhone 4″), but we can often compete for related, less popular, search terms.

So you’ve got an online business idea and now you want a website of your very own. Not one of those Blogger or other hosted blog services, but something that is uniquely your own. You checked in with a local web designer and they will do it for a high-three-figure price – but you don’t want to spend that sort of money.

Well, there is good news. You can do it yourself. You’ll need to learn a few things, but once you learn those, setting up a website is not that difficult.  Over the course of half a dozen posts, I’m going to show you the six steps you need to go through to build your own website.

1- Buy a domain and web hosting service

2- Activate your domain

3- Install WordPress to serve as the web site content management software