First Page Ranking on Google, Cheap and Easy. You’re welcome.
Oh, the ‘elusive’ first page result ranking for your website on Google… the holy grail.
Bah. It isn’t tough at all, really. Actually, I accomplished it with an existing site that ranked so poorly, I stopped looking after the 8th page of Google search results.
Follow these three fundamental tips, and you’ll get there too.
- Utilize a free Webmasters account on Google
- Create and upload a sitemap
- Follow very basic meta tagging principles.
I did these three things, and the site I was working on went from absolute obscurity to the very first page (#5) for a few important keywords (or search phrases) within two weeks.
1.) Utilize a free Webmasters account on Google.
You’ll have to establish an account with Google if you don’t already have one. It can be difficult to find using Google’s menu. I’ve included a link to it above.
Next, click the Add a Site button to add your URL to your Webmasters account:
Follow the directions to insert a personally-generated tracking code to the index page of your site. You’ll have the option of inserting this code into the <head> of the web document, or you can have Google generate an individual file that you’ll just upload to the root of your server. I’ve always just added the javascript code to the head section of my index pages, it always works.
When you have completed that, Google will instruct you to verify ownership of the website by clicking a button. Google will go check that the correct code is correctly placed, and that finishes step one.
2.) Create and upload a sitemap.xml file to Google.
This may sound difficult and foreboding. This is probably the easiest step. Go to XML-Sitemaps.com and enter the URL for your website:
It will give you a sitemap.xml file to download to your computer. Next, take that xml file and upload to your root directory.
Go back to Google Webmaster tools:
You’ll upload your sitemap directly to Google. I like to think that giving Google a sitemap of your site is like giving it directions to your house, the key to the front door, and free reign of the refrigerator and cable television while you’re out. You make it incredibly easy for Google to spider your URLs on a weekly or monthly basis. Without this, Google comes to your site whenever it has the time. Be a good host, let the Google spider in!
3.) Follow very basic meta tagging principles.
It’s 2011, people. I don’t know how many webpages I do a view source on, to see no <title> tag, no <keywords> entries, no <description> data, and no <alt> tags on pictures.
<head><title>Title of Your Website</title>
Make the title of each webpage the topic of discussion on that page. If you must include the name of your company,
the name of your blog, do it at the end of the title like this:
<title>Pulling wheelies on Harleys | F. Barleysheath's blog</title>
People are going to search for how to pull a wheelie on a Harley, they won’t be looking for F. Barleysheath’s blog, so make the searchable term first in the title.
Always include meta attributes for keywords and description, like so:
<meta name="keywords" content="pulling wheelies, harley davidson, how to" /> <meta name="description" content="Pulling wheelies on Harleys isn't hard." />
Notice that the title of the webpage, the keywords, and the description all have the same phrase right at the beginning. This is your opportunity to showcase to the search engines what your site’s about. Put the title and meta tags in the <head> section of your webpage.
Lastly, add some alt attributes to all your images. It would look like this in html:
<img src="wheelie.jpg" alt="pulling a wheelie on uncle's harley" />
Enclose in quotation marks a good descriptor of the image,
and try to marry the webpage’s focus to the image alt tags, and you’ll be ahead of 80% of the website owners out there.
