The big question when it comes to ranking in the Search Engines is “how to get your website to the top of Google?”.  You spend ages creating your site and you finally unleash it on the world then patiently wait for it to go rocketing to the top but of Google. Then, you guessed it, nothing happens!  No visitors, no cash rolling in like they said there would.

Your site is open 24/7 but no-one knows it’s there!  What a bummer!

Does this sound familiar?  The truth is it happens to all of us. Yep, that’s right, we all have that sinking feeling and, yes we’ve all thought “I can’t do this, I’m giving up”.

Well now, that’s not how to get your website to the top of Google is it?

It’s all about covering the basics, those tedious but incredibly important first steps when you are building the site that are important, that is of course if you really do want to get your page to the top of Google!  The most crucial of all the basics is the Key Words you choose for your on page optimization.  You can’t cut corners, with this you have to do solid Keyword research and establish if there is anyone actually searching for the keyword terms you have chosen and, or course, if there is any money in that particular market.

The first thing to do is go online and search for good keyword tools like those below:

If money is tight the free tools above will do the job just fine.  If you have a little extra money to invest in a paid keyword tool like Market Samurai it’s fantastic.  The amount of information it gathers is incredible.

Using the online or paid tools mentioned above will enable you to find some less competitive keyword phrases.  One of the big problems with people starting out is that they go for keyword phrases that are so incredibly competitive.  The bottom line is that they just don’t stand a chance.  For example, if you do a search in Google for a keyword phrase say ‘Dogs For Sale’ there are hundreds of millions of competing websites and the chances are very slim that you will rank for this term. Only the main authority sites for that keyword phrase will rank.  So, the aim is to look for keywords which are a lot less competitive because you will have a greater chance of ranking for them if you optimize the site correctly.

It is also critical to analyze what the page rank is of all the sites that are on page one for your chosen keyword phrase. Page rank is used by Google in ranking websites and generally the higher the page rank of a site the more difficult it will be to displace it.   There are a whole pile of factors but the main thing is that the more links that you have pointing back to your website from other websites the higher your Google page rank will be. That is, of course providing that your content and keywords are done correctly.  You can use a number of tools to check your page rank; Google or the ALEXA toolbars both do a great job also Market Samurai will track all of your links at once if you wish to via its internal Rank Tracker.

Step 1

Do some checking on the websites that are sitting on page one for your chosen keyword phrase. This is your competition.  This is simple to do; you just check the HTML or source code of the site. Click on the link that is top of the page in Google for your keyword phrase, click in your browser and then source.  The code will then appear as a page or in notepad depending on which browser you use.  This is how the search engine ‘bots’ see your site.  Here, you will be able to see what on-page optimisation is being used to help the site rank so highly (number one) in the search engines.

Step 2

Search engine optimization involves on-page and off-page optimization which will help you to get your website to the top of Google. We will just be focusing on page optimisation. We will look at off page optimisation in more detail at another time. When you first view the source code it looks like a different language (which it is) but there are a couple of markers you can look for.

Step 3

Look for the site’s Title. This should appear immediately below the head tag. Once again make a note of the keywords that they are using in the title so you can use them or a similar version in yours. It is also critical that your main keyword or keyword phrase is in your title too.

Step 4

Check the Keywords that they are using in the ‘meta tags’ and make a note of them. You will use the same keywords they use and more if appropriate,

Step 5

Check out the keywords that they have used in their Description again make a note of their description.  Repeat your main keyword or keywords phrase two or three times in the description but obviously in a way that makes sense.  Don’t do it too much or Google will see this as key word stuffing and penalise you.

Step 6

Take a close look at their webpage to see if they have used bold, underlined or italicised their main keywords; if they have then it’s good practice to do the same thing. If you have trouble looking for these codes in the notepad or webpage itself  use the ‘find’ command to look them up.

Step 7

Look in the source code to see whether they have taken the time to optimise their images for the chosen keyword. For example, some website images will simply have ‘car.jpg’ as the name of their image but have not used alternative text. An example of alternative text would be ‘silver jaguar car’. This may also be one of your key words in your article or content or even be in the title or description of your site.

Just sticking to a few of these very simple SEO strategies and techniques will go a long way to increasing your rank in the search engines.  To ensure good ranking it’s absolutely vital that you spend some quality time researching and using the fundamentals discussed above. Once you know what to do you just ‘rinse and repeat’ over and over again and that’s how to get your website to the top of Google providing you aren’t trying to rank for an outrageously competitive keyword phrase.

If you would like to seriously speed up your progress with ranking in google please visit my blog http://daveward.org/

All the very best for your future success

Dave Ward