This is a short piece I wrote for work to help others understand the theory behind SERP domination. I pulled quite a bit of the information from Eli’s SERP Domintation article on the Blue Hat SEO blog. I don’t warrant that this process will help you rank better in search engines in any way, but feel free to try these techniques at your own risk.

Goal:
By the time you finish reading this document, you will have a clear idea of what you must do to dominate the search engine result page –that is, rank multiple times on the first search result page for a specific keyword or keyword phrase using several different web sites and domain names.

What You Need:
1. The keyword or keyword phrase you are trying to dominate (it is tougher to rank for multiple keywords / phrases, but it can potentially be done).

2. 15-20 individual domain names / web sites with highly optimized, relevant content (content built around the same subject matter).

3. At least weekly relevant content updates to each property. Preferably, these sites would have social community elements such as forums, commenting, etc. to encourage more frequent search engine crawling.

4. Each individual site footer should provide a link to the homepage of each of the 20 other sites. To make this cleaner looking, CSS provides a way to make a DIV hidden until a link is clicked, which would cause the DIV to expand, displaying all the links.

5. Use rel=”No Follow” link tag elements on all links that are not important for search. To better sculpt a page’s authority, this tag element can also be used to direct how a spider should crawl a site.

6. Targeted videos should be created for the selected keyword and be placed on YouTube with optimized tagging.

7. Images should be created for content rich pages. During creation, keyword rich meta data should be included in the image, the image should be named using targeted keywords, an alt tag including keywords should be used when including the image on a page, and the image should be placed, surrounded by keyword rich text.

8. A link building campaign that provides thousands incoming links to the properties in the group of 15-20 sites. 40,000+ total inbound links should get the sites ranking within the top 5 pages.

Recommendation:
As you can probably tell, this is a rather complicated process and could potentially take a lot of time and money. There is the potential to receive only meager results, since after all, you can really only target one keyword term or phrase with this strategy. This strategy is also a risk in that the sites could be penalized by search engines as a result or suffer in the long term due to an algorithm change.

A better strategy to pursue is to apply similar concepts on a per-site or per-webpage basis in attempting to rank for a group of keywords (one per page). Combined with paid search, it would be much more feasible to have three listings (paid result, top listing, and secondary top listing) at the top of the first page of a search engine for many keywords, rather than attempting to take over all ten positions on a search engines results page for a non-branded keyword. This also creates more possible brand touch points for customers as they search. Each of the concepts above apply to both single and multiple keyword SEO, but I believe you will find better success targeting multiple keywords verses putting all your eggs in one basket.