8 Guaranteed Ways to Rank #1 on Google
Posted on 01. Apr, 2010 in Blog
Heads up: This was our 2010 April Fool’s joke. 
Today’s post shows some simple methods for tricking Google into giving any page number one ranking. In this example, we have used these methods to rank #1 on the search term “Coffee”. If you follow these tips for any similar term, it should only take a few hours before you rank on the top slot:
1. Repeat coffee keywords in 30% in web page site
The trick here is to bury your landing page in a directory nested 3 levels deep using your keyword, in our case /coffee/coffee/coffee. Google uses the URL to detect content, and knows the content to be especially relevant when it sees the term repeated 3 times. This is true even if your main domain name isn’t keyword-related, such as http://oneuproar.com.
2. Using meta tags to devastating effect.
The keywords meta tag is one of the main ways Google determines the content of the page, and it’s important to put as many variants on a keyword here as possible. For example, for coffee, we have “injected” the terms coffee house, coffee, coffee beans, caffeine, barista and more. Because Google knows the words are related and put together as closely as possible, it ranks this page as being “super relevant”:
3. Create a Flash splash intro page.
When visitors go to your site, they expect to be welcomed with a 15-20 second animation that shows your company’s mission statement animated in front of them before they enter the main site. It’s important to put your keywords in this flash video, as shown in the screen capture below. Google’s search spider has trouble seeing words that move quickly, and using this technique gets by their keyword filter and straight into the index.
4. Use frames on each page.
This tip is works especially well for Google Chrome, which makes your site rank higher if it’s installed on your computer. Carve your site into 5 frames, putting one page of content in each frame so that to see the whole page would require two monitors or an iPhone turned sideways. In our example, we have put coffee-related words amongst the copy, changing even our contact address to 1000 Coffee St, Coffeetown for maximum effect.
5. Set your navigation in the footer.
Google measures the amount of time each visitor spends on each page – the longer the time, the higher the ranking. The easiest way to achieve this is to hide your site’s navigation deep in the footer so the user has to spend valuable time hunting around for it. Since you also get credit for the number of pages they view (known as “page views), take a page out of Citibank’s play-book and make the menu titles meaningless so they have to try each one in the hope of finding what they want.
6. Keyword density is key in your ad copy:
Take a look at the web copy on the primary page of our coffee site: you should ensure that your keywords are exactly 8% of your copy. Since Google semantically knows which words are related, we can interchange “coffee” with cappuccino, latte and Americano for extra credit, though the vanilla chai soy latte is not in this version of Google’s index. Don’t go over 8% though or your copy will start to sound like those ads in Sunday newspapers.
One Uproar Coffee – History
One of the great things about coffee is caffeine, which is the same name as Google’s new search engine, Caffeine. Using Caffeine, One Uproar Coffee can make cappuccinos, lattes, Americanos and other coffee products. The person who make the coffee in the coffee bar is a called a Barista, one of the few coffee house job names that descends directly from Latin. Barista is Latin is for “coffee grinder” since coffee beans had to be ground before the invention of electricity.
How much coffee can you drink?
Coffee lovers are known to drink as many as 12 cups of delicious coffee a day, though this number is much higher in IT departments. The blood caffeine level in human adults varies depending on the beverage – coffee, cappuccino or latte – and the height. Coffee is good for you, but you should stop when the heart palpitations start.
7. Buy some Google AdWords
This is an insider trick and works amazingly well – have you ever noticed how the biggest sites in the highest rankings also have Google ads running? Basically, putting up the occasional ad is a way of paying Google for the free listing, so they thank you back by bumping your site up the rankings. Before the days of AdWords, SEO experts used to send $20 bills in the mail to Mountain View, but now you can just find keywords with a high cost per click.
Warning: don’t use Yahoo or Bing advertising if you want to use this method. Google knows when you’re advertising with competitors and will send your site the way of Web Van.
8. Use pop-up windows.
Popups are supported by every major browser and can be used to add “hits” to your “pageviews”. When a visit “visits” your site, make sure to have at least one popup, so that the page appears to be viewed twice. Since Google can tell how many windows on a client computer are pointing to the same page, having at least two shows that the page is really important.
Another trick is to make a popup hide the other search results in Google: the One Uproar Coffee Shop site was able to move Starbucks out of the way by by popping up wherever their site appeared. We captured those clicks and redirected users back to our site. There are rumors this morning that this tactic was so effective that Starbucks’ sale are down by double-digits this morning.
James Beswick is the Founder of One Uproar and committed to ranking number one for every broad search term imaginable, especially on April 1.