The Ultimate Guide To Ranking Well

Jump into a search engine and look for the phrase, “how to rank well in search engines.” In Google, I get 88 million results. Now look for the phrase, “how to get content seen on Facebook.” I get 5.1 billion (with a “b”) results.

Ranking well, whether it’s in a search engine or in Facebook’s mysterious Edgerank algorithm, is critical to the success of many brand’s online activities. The better you rank, the more you’re seen. The more you’re seen, the more clicks, conversions and so on. It’s not the only way you can be successful online, but it is probably the most impactful determinant of online success.

For the last decade or so, many an expert has emerged to teach us how to rank well in search engines. Respected thought leaders like Danny Sullivan, Rand Fishkin and the like have built businesses and careers out of it.

We’re probably entering a time in the maturation of digital marketing when new experts will emerge to help you figure out the same ranking problem for Facebook. Folks like Jeff Widman and Dennis Yu are already making names for themselves in the “figuring out Facebook” realm. And we’re all better marketers for paying attention to them.

And while the advice of the above and many others in how to rank well on search engines and on Facebook is mostly sound, trusted advice, there’s one glaring gap in all this rank rancor. For you really and truly only need to do one thing to rank well on either platform:

Write amazing content

If you write amazing content, people will link to you. If you write amazing content, people will share it. If you write amazing content, people will comment on it. If you write amazing content, people will visit it.

Yes, you need to know all that other stuff, too. But the hard part of all this is that writing amazing content is not easy. Everything you write won’t be amazing. Everything you write won’t get attention … or links … or traffic. So having some technical tricks up your sleeve can help on those days when the content isn’t amazing, or the world is busy paying attention to something else.

But let’s not get lost in the busy-ness of SEO and Edgerank too much. Spend half the time you’ve spent studying ways to game the system and just produce content that games it for you.