The top listing on Google is the “Holy Grail” for any site developer. Not only will it gain you the most visitors, but also prestige and ensure you appear an authority on a particular topic.
Getting to the top cannot be achieved overnight (without paying a fortune) but may take from anything between 3 months to a couple of years depending on the type of site and the amount of time and knowledge you have available.
Below are 10 tips that will ensure you have as high a listing as possible.
1. Don’t deploy an incomplete website.
You may well be tempted to release your website before it is ready. Before you deploy anything look at your site and decide whether it depicts what you want your final site to be. If it is a shop don’t deploy it with no products, for informative sites ensure you have at least 50-75 articles.
2. Create internal links.
Ensure you can navigate to every page in your site from any start point. It is well worth spending time choosing different pages and measuring how many links you have to click on to get to different pages. In your articles link to other related articles, or other articles a reader may find of interest. Do not however fill each page with links as Google may interpret this as spam of a “Gateway page”.
3. Domain name
Previously sites with keywords in their name were seen as authorities in a particular market, this is no longer the case. Not only is it easier to find a “brandable” domain name, it also makes your site more memorable.
4. Keep generating “Fresh” content.
Search engines love active content. Do not build a number of articles and then deploy the site, the site will become stagnant and start slipping down the rankings. Aim to generate 5-10 new articles a week.
5. Allow active content.
Sites with forums or the ability for users to add comments are often higher up in Google. Allow this type of content on your site. Ensure users don’t simply use it to add links to their sites and that any links that are posted are relevant.
6. Submit the site to Search Engines and Web Directories.
Obviously Google is the most relevant, many sites offer the service to submit your URL to thousands of web directories, this is worth doing but ensure you submit it to the main ones (Google, Ask, AltaVista, Yahoo etc).
7. Analytics.
Use an analytics package (my preferred choice is Google Analytics) to track traffic and to see which pages are viewed the most, which pages are not viewed often, which leads lead to sales etc, this can be extremely useful in boosting traffic to pages.
Look out for spiders on the analytics package; check they are able to reach every page on the site. If they seem to be missing certain pages, link these into to pages that are being crawled.
8. Use original good quality content.
Search engines often ban sites that plagiarise content or violate copyright. Ensure all content on your site is original. Content must also be well written with correct spelling.
9. Ensure your site is well designed.
Build your site to ensure simplicity to read both by users and search engine crawlers. Minimize the use of script and Flash as crawlers have trouble reading these formats. Ensure all content that is likely to be searched for is written in clean html. Validate the html.
The content to tags ration of your site is important. Content should outweigh the html tags ideally by at least a ratio of 2-1. Use style sheets to remove the quantity of html formatting tabs.
Try to ensure page size is below about 10k, the smaller the better for many search engines but also many surfers around the world are still using 56k modems (a few even less).
10. Do not try to con the search engine.
Search engines are constantly trying to improve the way they rank sites based on the keywords searched for. Consequently they are eliminating “unethical” methods some sites use to try to improve their page rank. Ensure any means you use are genuine methods; if unsure ask yourself if what you are doing is going to help someone find the article they want to view.
Follow the above points and in six months see where your site is, if it still is not on that fabled first page