Alot people ask “How do I make my website #1 on Google?” There are 5 simple facts that will help. These facts, if implemented on your site will take your site to the top (if not to the first position.
- Name your site properly! If the name of your company, or more importantly your website, doesn’t contain at least one word that users might search for you might have problems. For instance if your company builds widgets it’s name should be something like “The Best Widget Building Company” or “Widget Builders Inc.”. Having the name of your website reflect this is quite important. Google ranks the name of the site (or your url) one of the most important factors in determining relevance of a site. So www.widgetbuilderinc.com will be more relevant for a search for “widget builder” than say www.somecompanyname.com.
- Use metatags! Metatags are the internet’s way of describing content. Inside of a company you may call this metadata, keywords, or something of the sort. The metatags are elements within your site that are hidden from the normal user’s view, but control quite a bit in terms of searchability, and what you see within a web browser. For instance the text that appears in Internet Explorer’s tabs come directly from the “Title” metatag. The most important tags to ensure your site has are:
- Title – this is included in your html as home page is “” As you can see this is also what appears in the IE8 tabs when you open the page
- Description – The description tag is another very powerful metatag that is hidden from users on your page, but is actually displayed on Google! This description tag is what, in most cases, you see under the link portion of a Google Result. It is important that you create a descriptive description for each page, as well as make them notate the navigation of your site. These don’t have to be written in full sentences, but sometimes that helps!
- Get visits to your site! Google also considers the traffic to your site as a key indicator to it’s relevance or at least the quality of your site. Simply stated, More visitors = higher results. So how do you do this? Well leveraging social media is one way, pushing people to a Blog portion of your page is another. You can read some more on this topic in our blog post “The SEO Benefits of Cross Posting your Blog”. Perhaps one of the simplest is providing (or mandating) a reason for them to go there. Say you are a contractor, and you are talking to a potential client. You obviously give them your business card after the conversation is done. But is your website listed on it? Did you put on your card “See our portfolio at www.mysite.com” if not, you have missed one of the easiest ways to drive them there. I have seen a very effective way recently… don’t even put your phone number on the card, simply the web address!
- Get, give and leverage links! Links are an important portion of Google’s “PageRank” (check out Wikipedia for more information). The basic method is that you need to get “Highly Important” pages to link to you, you need to link to “Highly Important” pages and you need to link to your own content on your site. Simple, I know. But building these links is tricky. Leveraging an SEO company usually helps here!
- Have useful, content written in user terminology! This is perhaps one of the easiest things to mess up. People that quite often are experts in what they do have a tendency to write webpages in a way that user’s don’t understand. These use terminology that only another expert would know. For instance I reviewed a site recently for a Pottstown PA roofing company. On there site they mentioned flashing, corrugated this, and thermal moisture barriers etc. Even being a somewhat technical guy, who does know a bit about home repairs and construction, I simply couldn’t wrap my head around what they were trying to say. So I asked… “What really does this do?” The answer was what should have been written.. “We use some advance materials that makes the roof more water proof, and maintain the temperature of your home or office.” Great! Something that we could finally drive users to understand. So use the language that people that aren’t experts use, and they will find it more often!
So with the 5 simple rules now more clear, start working! If you need help, contact us today for a FREE SEO Analysis review of your site!