Short Guide to Become Nr. 1 at Google

Google is the biggest and most important search engine on the Internet. Thousands of people use Google every day for doing searches on almost anything you can think of. This way the websites that come up first on the list of search results have the opportunity to be visited by the same thousands of people. Having more visitors mean more potential clients and that leads to more business and in the end: More sales.

So in short being nr. 1 at Google equals a big opportunity to make your business grow and therefore if you are the owner of an online business you need to focus on how to get your website to be nr. 1 at Google. In the following we will look further into what the professionals call SEO - that is: Search Engine Optimization.

SEO is basically a set of techniques that are used to improve the visibility of a website in search engine listings. First of all it is a question of optimizing the website in a way so the search engines are able to read the site. Next it is a question of giving the website a good structure and using keyword phrases and finally it is a question of building a solid network of links.

To make sure that the search engines are able to read what is actually on your website you need to validate your website. Each webpage need to be written in a valid HTML or XHTML language and fortunately you can check and validate this at the W3C website (http://validator.w3.org) This is the World Wide Web Consortium so in other words the people who build the internet so they know what it is about.

Having validated the webpage you need to rename the files of the webpages in a way so you optimize it for the keywords. The keywords are the words you want to be found by. Are you for instance in the hotel business in California you want people to find you when they search for "hotel in Southern California". You would then want file names like: www.yourdomain.com/hotel_in_sourthern_california.htm in stead of www.yourdomain.com/page2.htm.

In the same way you need to rename titles by using optimised keywords related to your business or domain as titles. The titles should not exceed 64 characters because the engines do not read more than this.

The next step is a bit more technical. Each page should have unique set of keywords and description stored as metadata. This is usually something you can edit in you website editor or if you are familiar with Html then it will in the Head section. Some search engines use Meta tags as a contributing factor to page ranking and some don't. Meta description tag should be a well-written summary of the page intended at the website visitors rather than the search engine. It should not be longer than 250 characters. Meta keywords tag should contain the most important keywords/keyword phrases.

And now for the actual content of the pages. Keyword optimized content should be in the first 100-200 words on the page as they are regarded very important by the search engines. The keyword-group-oriented-content should be concentrated in this area. Especially the home page is an extremely important page as this is what is usually submitted to the search engines. Normally this is the starting point for search engine spidering.

In addition to the basic content development as cited above the home page should be attributed with more relevant keywords. The home page crafted in this manner will be fit for optimization as it contains a balanced set of keyword groups and would prove to be far more powerful in search engine promotion as against a set of images with no alt attributes.

You need to build a site map and this should be at the start of each web page, including the home page, and should be one the first links on all the pages. Preferably use text links rather than image links. If you are using image links, specify the descriptive alt attribute. The easiest way to see if the images have alt tags is to switch off the images in the browser and see if the text is shown in place of the image.

The main website navigation links should be made available at the head and foot of each web page. If possible add appropriate breadcrumb trail to each page, preferably at the top of the page. This will give you more internal links. For Example - Song Name>Artist\Band Name>Gender> Age range> search results.

Another important detail is to structure each page by using structural mark-up such as headings ( h1 to h6) and paragraphs (P). The headings should be meaningful and should include keywords. Minimise the use of tags, instead use and tags. This will minimise the code base, make the content more directly available and uncluttered, as well minimise coding errors arising from unclosed tags and improperly nested tables.

Make sure you have a robots.txt file in the root of your web server. This will tell the search engines to index your site and which pages they should index. Well-behaved spiders will always check this file first. META robots tag is used to tell search engines which pages they should index. A standard robot text file are as follows:

User-agent: *

Disallow: Error page or 404 pages. Custom Error pages can be used to redirect the user to your homepage or a sitemap in the event of a dead link. This will keep them on the site rather than assuming that you are no longer in the business. For ASP pages this can be done using IIS and PHP pages using .htaccess file.

All of these changes depend on a good analysis of your competitors. This should be done to find out right keyword competitor use and to find out better keyword phrases that can target website by customers and prospects. The right keywords for optimization and their popularity can be found using free tools like Overture and Wordtracker trial version.

Finally you will need to start building links. Inbound links, links from other websites to your website are extremely important. To increase the inbound links and make the link popularity figure higher you should consider exchanging links with sites with higher page ranking. To add links identify link directories, free engine submissions and Affiliate/Partner/Supplier Reciprocal Links. Summarily link popularity can be achieved by increasing inbound links.

Hopefully what you get from this is: Increased traffic to website and as a result of this a growing business with big potential.