How to achieve a First Page Google Ranking
A Trio of Basic Tools for Top Google Rankings
Achieving a first-page Google ranking can be compared to you, your product or your service being spotlighted on BBC or ITV in terms of the volume of public exposure. Accomplishing such prominence on Google’s search engine is determined by your keyword choices. Google is the world’s preferred search engine for a reason — searches are highly targeted and accurate, meaning you get results that are exactly what you needed.
Pre-Google, searching was done through sites such as Alta Vista, Lycos, Excite, Yahoo, and later, AskJeeves. Users would have to sift through a large amount of pages before finding what they wanted.
When Google arrived, it operated using a search engine with stricter search guidelines on how search results were displayed. These guidelines were designed using an index of keywords that has evolved over the years to produce the most accurate search algorithm available.
To increase your chances of a first-page Google ranking, it is essential to follow some basic SEO guidelines that help you to identify the keywords that pertain to your listing and also will be quickly captured by Google’s search engine.
1. Keyword Research
Two things are essential for higher page rankings: adding pages to your website and writing content for those pages that is keyword rich.
In order to write keyword rich content, you need to research keywords that are used most often, per Google, to search for your type of business or service.
You can begin by using the Google Keyword Planner, which allows you to freely analyse the keywords used most often by searchers using Google. Pull a list of keywords and craft your webpage content around them. Using less competitive and long tail keywords/phrases is the best approach to achieving higher rankings quicker. An example of a competitive keyphrase would be: Cosmetic Dentist London, which could be bettered by expanding it to: Cosmetic Dentist in West London. Qualifying terms for location or specialities can result in more refined search results and a higher ranking.
2. Optimise Your Content with Targeted Keyword Combos
Google search engines consider every bit of content on your website or blog. This means that you need to tweak your content to not only snag perfect target keyword entries, but any combination of those keywords. Ensuring that Google’s search engine captures your site, you must write multiple combinations of the keywords you discovered using the Google Keyword Planner throughout the site. Consider the headings for each of your pages, the content within, your blog posts, and any posted articles.
If your keywords are: coffee, imported, premium, fresh ground, London, shop, Columbian, they can be combined in your content as normally structured sentences under various headings.
For example:
Premium Columbian Coffee
One step inside our London coffee shop, located on the fashionable West end, and you will be dazzled by the array of premium, imported coffees available. We specialise in fresh ground, Columbian coffees.
3. Build Quality Back links
Lastly, to secure and maintain your Google first-page ranking is it vital to build strong back links to your content. This can be accomplished by joining or creating networks with related websites, posting articles on industry blogs, forums or newsletters that include links to your site, and developing your own newsletter that links directly back to your website.
Attaining a Google first-page ranking isn’t impossible, but it does take research, continual maintenance and updating, and writing thoughtful, keyword-driven content. You can do it!