Google is not your enemy. I know this might sound unbelievable if you’ve been dashed in the past or recently by those Panda updates!?

But the truth is that Google just like every other digital company out there have a goal – to deliver the best results to those who use their search engine.

Let’s say I’m looking to hire a plumber in my city. After much searches in Google with no viable results, where do you think I’d go next? You got it right. I would either go to Yahoo, Bing, Duck Duck go or Mamma which happens to be the best alternatives at the moment.

Now what do you think would happen to Google? I’m so sorry Larry Page, you’ve just lost a potential AdWords advertiser.

I think you should forget all about the ugly aspects of Panda 1, 2, 3 and 4 as well as Penguin and move on with your initial plan of building a sustainable online business. Why whine over spilled milk – you can’t gather it but you can definitely get another one.

Over the years I’ve listened to SEO experts deliver keynote speeches on the immense power of backlinks and how to get them.

And they’re correct. You need backlinks and sometimes plenty of high PR links to rank your content pages. But that’s not what this post is about. I’m not a link building expert, so I’ll rather leave that job to those who are specialists at it.

Why powerful backlinks may not help?

I’ve built about 5 authority websites since 2010. I’ve tested the waters and now understand what it takes to get higher rankings in Google. Before Panda and Penguin updates, powerful backlinks used to work so well, but it’s a different ball game now.

You might be surprised to know that getting high PR links may not even boost your rankings in Google. Instead, it could even push your rankings further down the search results – maybe to page 21. Oops!

There is one powerful way I’ve been using for the past 3 years to achieve desirable rankings in Google, even for new websites. It’s a lot easier/possible right now to get all the authority link juices to your website, and even convince hundreds of people to give you a social love via Facebook and Twitter.

And Google is targeting backlinks that look unnatural and irrelevant. Matt Cutts and other staff are now conducting manual reviews on spotlight websites. If your website has links from spammy sites that are irrelevant and contains a lot of other links too, then you may be in for a penalty.

Stop the rush: Link building is not the solution

Before I share the one powerful way to take your site rankings to the top of Google, I want to caution you to stop link building. Of course, not totally because you can’t control who links to you. But that’s where it gets better – when other people are convinced to cite, recommend or highlight your link using their own chosen anchor text.

That’s exactly what Google is looking for. That’s the only language that matters to Google right now and if you must win the search game and drive free organic traffic; you’ve to abide by this rule. And the rule isn’t tedious to follow – you just need to do what is right and provide immense value for your target audience.

The problem with waiting…

If you’re like me, you hate waiting and wouldn’t want anything to obstruct your movement. What Google wants is a trusted link from a trusted website flowing to yours. But how long are you going to wait for people to find your posts helpful, valuable and then make up their minds to link back to you in their own language?

I can’t tell you for certain how long. Funny enough, most powerful articles that are helpful are never shared. There are other factors that trigger social shares from your target audience. Even copywriters know – they can persuade you to buy a product you never planned to have in the first place. You were persuaded emotionally but you thought it was logical.

Authority links from Wikipedia, web 2.0 sites, Edu. and Gov. links are still very effective, but how on earth are you going to get your URL onto those sites? You must be a close friend to President Obama before the editors can link to you from Whitehouse.gov.

It’s time to make a change…

Stop all the link building strategies you’ve been taught and let me show you ‘just’ one powerful way to skyrocket your rankings to the homepage of any search engine. Are you ready?

“Increase your Site Speed!”

Google is so passionate about people who use their search engine to look for information online. If your website is slow, you’re indirectly telling Google spider that your website isn’t good enough for the search users. You’re not ready to solve a particular problem yet. You don’t value someone’s time which is so precious and priceless.

How would you feel if you visit Amazon to buy a Wrist Watch, but you’re unable to view the image of the item? You refreshed the page 3 times, only to find a broken link? You might be forced to use ebay.com or Target.com to place your order. These giant eCommerce portals have come to understand the effect of speed on their network. You too must.

Here’s what Google has to say concerning site speed:

“You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.”

So you’ve got to get your site to load faster, or displease Google. And when that happens, you’ll struggle to gain high rankings in Google. And if you can’t rank in Google homepage, your daily hits will dwindle and eventually drown. I hate to see you sad. Therefore, let me show you a trick on how to boost your website speed within 24 hours…

Use a Content Delivery Network

I’m sure your web host is reliable and affordable. If not, you may have to choose another host, no sentiments and no questions asked. Period!

Once you’re in control of your site, the next step is to use a content delivery network. This is simply a system that will accelerate the speed of your site, and reduce the server load by 94%. Based on the geographic location of your reader/visitor, a CDN provider will deliver cached content from websites using several dispersed servers.

In other words, if your site visitors reside in UK, a CDN server in that region will serve your content to them, in a more robust platform and faster.

After Google panda, I decided to research the top CDN providers online to increase RatingWidget’s speed and rank higher on some of the negatively affected keywords. Two days of reviews read, features and pricing evaluation, and test riding more six different CDN services, I came up with this top 3 CDN providers:

• MaxCDN
• CloudFlare
• CacheFly

These providers on a daily basis are delivering content from different reliable servers across the world. When choosing a particular content delivery network, you’ve to carry out your due research to determine whether or not the features of each service suits your needs.

Examples of authority sites utilizing CD networks are StackOverflow, DISQUS, TheNextWeb, BuySellAds and so on… At RatingWidget we’ve chosen to use CloudFlare because it has some features that are valuable for our service like GeoIP and scripts auto minify. Adding a CDN has definitely helped us to rank higher on Google for many relevant keywords.

If you’re tired of building links upon links and seeing no significant results in your rankings, what you need is a content delivery system. It’ll improve your site’s performance, speed, and give you the much needed SEO benefits; top rankings and targeted traffic.