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.