February 2013 - SEO Services for Cheltenham & Bristol Areas

In every industry there are certain questions that always get asked more than others, for SEO this has to be the MOST popular question:

How can I get my website on the first page of Google?

So for all those people out there wanting to know the answer to this question and the people who ask me every day here is the answer…

The first thing I tell people is not to worry about where your website ranks for certain keywords, isn’t having more visitors more important? Especially the visitors that are looking for your product or service. Ok you may have to rank well for some keywords to get these visitors but don’t focus completely on the ranking positions.

With that said the question still stands.

As I write this there are a few major signals you can optimise to help your website rank well. So if you do nothing else I suggest doing these few tasks:

Title tag:

Each page can have a title tag written in HTML (some people are using more than one title tag but we do NOT recommend this). If you are using a CMS like WordPress or Joomla this is very easy to update. So make sure you use this tag, try and have the keyword you are targeting near the start of the tag as this has a small advantage to having it further down the sentence.

Don’t list a load of keywords one after another, that looks spammy and the powers that be in Google will not like it. Plus remember this single line is most likely the first thing a new customer reads about your site, so make it count!

Content:

There is no point in having a keyword in the title tag if it doesn’t relate to the content on the page, firstly the visitor will just bounce off your site and probably never return, and secondly Google will think you are trying to fool them (they don’t like that either).

Links:

You don’t need millions of links from other websites to get your website to rank well, so please do NOT sign up to those services that give you 10,000 links for £10.

By using social media or other means contact related websites to yours and see if they would provide you with a link, unless it is the BBC or CNN try not provide a reciprocal link back as it weakens the signal to Google a little.

Something to bare in mind, if your website has great content why wouldn’t Google want to rank it well for the subject you have on your webpage, Google wants good quality search results so just help them out and they will help you out!

Juicy SEO Limited is a search engine optimisation and conversion rate optimisation company based in Cheltenham, Bristol and Farnham. If you would like help with your SEO campaign please get in contact.

The search results of Google are split into two sections, on the right hand side and the top few are results of PPC (pay per click) adverts. It can cost a fair amount of money to have your website listed at the top of the PPC section for certain words.
The main bulk of the search results are organic results which are results of search engine optimisation (SEO), unless you are very lucky and have got good search results without doing SEO. Again running a SEO campaign takes time and more often than not money too (if not doing it yourself).

So is it fair that Google are putting adverts for one of their services at the top of the results. For example Google now offer a compare option for the keyword ‘car insurance’ (for example). By clicking on their link it takes you to the first step in comparing car insurance. I’m not going to go into the service they are offering or if they are making money from it or not, I’ll let you decide yourself on that! 😉

They actually say they are not making any money off it, well not directly anyway.

But is it fair that they can put their advert at the top of the search results?
I can also see what they are trying to do, making it easier for people to compare insurance (in this case). I do feel sorry for those comparison websites out their though! How will they compete with Google, they have to make money too.

What is stopping them from creating an advert for ‘hairdressers in Birmingham’ or ‘download music here’ or whatever YOUR keywords are?!

Is this the start of Google slowly taking over the internet as we know it?

How can I get my website on the first page of Google?

Title tag:

Content:

Links:

Is it fair that Google can put their advert at the top of search results?