Ok, so you want to get to the top of Google. It’s quite possible, depending on how competitive your market is, and provided you’re willing to put the work in.
There are three main parts to improving your search engine ranking:
Step 1: Keyword Research
First you need to establish the most effective keywords to target for your website.
These should be a good combination of “buying keywords” (i.e. those that lead to a customer rather than a “tyre kicker”) combined with actual search volume. You need to analyze if a phrase is overly competitive and will cost you too much money or take too much time to go after, and if so, find alternatives.
There’s just no point in just identifying high traffic keywords, and going after them; it will take you too long to unseat the websites currently at the top.
Instead, find the low hanging fruit : keyword phrases with good search volume, not too much competition and that are “buying keywords”
Step 2: On Site Optimisation
With the keywords selected, you need to make sure your website is correctly optimised. This means including the phrase in the Title meta tag (preferably at the beginning), at the start of the text content and several times throughout the page.
You also need to make sure your internal linking is correct. Make sure all other pages point to your hompage with the main keyword phrase in the link.
Finally it pays to have great content, that covers the theme of your website in depth. The more pages of content you have, with each focused on a different sub-keyword, the better.
Step 3: Link Building
This is the long term, ongoing key to great rankings. You need to design a strategy for obtaining keyword rich, incoming links to your website on a regular basis.
There are many many ways to get incoming links. First there are content submission services, where you can submit short articles (including a link) to blogs and article directories. There are Rss submissions, directory submissions, social bookmarking, Video submissions, link networks, press releases and much much more.
The secret is to use as many diverse link techniques as you can, and if this looks a time consuming task then engage the services of one of the many search engine companies in your area.
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