I have ten key strategies to rank first on Google and I always talk about them with my clients when they ask me "How to rank my business first?" or “How to position my business in Google?” Actually, these are questions that we can often ask ourselves when we are about to build a website, or if we already have a site that is poorly positioned, or if we are thinking of increasing sales of our business, using traffic from Google as a growth engine.
Next I will describe which are the methods that answer these questions. But first, I want to explain a little about SEO.
What SEO is for me?
It is a marketing discipline focused on increasing visibility in organic (unpaid) search engine results.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) encompasses both the technical and creative elements necessary to improve the ranking of our domain and the pages that make up our website, in order to boost traffic and increase the recognition of search engines, especially the Google – which is the most popular in the world with almost 80% of the global search engine market.
There are many aspects of SEO that must be considered, from the words and terms that appear in the content of our page to the way in which other sites direct links to our domain (web address, such as myname.com). Sometimes SEO is simply a matter of making sure the site is structured in a way that search engines understand. But generally, when there are several websites competing in the same niche, field or industry, SEO will also try to transform the site into the most relevant to the most searched terms in Google, and that is achieved by working according to the methods that I will mention. then.
SEO is not just about building or repairing the website as needed to rank in search engines. SEO is related to improving people’s experience when browsing our website. I am totally convinced that these two principles go hand in hand. Maybe it was different a few years ago, but it is no longer a question of “cheating” so that Google adds us to its index and places us first, nowadays the usability and user experience factors are also measured by the algorithms of Google. That is, it is not enough to have content, but it must be interesting and generate some type of participation, benefit or benefit for the visitor.
My ten rules for SEO
The 10 keys that I will mention below, can perfectly serve any website owner, as a checklist to follow regardless of the site or web page and thus achieve position in the first Google result, or at least among the first from the first page. And it is always important to keep in mind that the competition in the area or niche of the website plays a very important role.
It should also be noted that here I summarize my own experience of several years as an SEO professional in various fields and industries. I believe that these methods can serve other people, whether they are professionals or not, in the hope that they can avoid some mistakes that I personally made in my career and maybe they can learn from my successes, to be able to appear much higher in Google.
So, let’s see what my 10 fundamentals are to rank first in Google:
1. Focus on your Keywords
Knowing how to choose well the keywords for which we want to position ourselves in Google is undoubtedly very important. They must be highly searched terms or words. For this I recommend using:
- the Google Keyword Tool, which shows how many times each search is done per month on Google. It also shows us similar and related searches that allow us to have a snapshot of the strongest and weakest keywords in terms of demand.
- Google search suggestions when you start searching for our term and other suggestions that might appear after the first 10 results at the bottom of the Google results page.
2. Have a good domain name
The name of our site is very important for SEO. A domain related to the relevant item or keywords can always play in our favor. If the search of potential visitors exactly matches our domain name, there is a very good chance of appearing first in that term, especially when there is not a lot of competition in that niche.
3. Have great Landing Pages:
Build landing pages (where visitors come from Google) specially designed so that their content is highly relevant to the keywords and that the user experience is of a high level. That is, if, for example, 100 people arrive on that page, and 95 return to Google in less than 5-10 seconds, that may mean that our content is not good, not interesting, not easy to read or perhaps we are erring in terms of designs.
In the content of the Landing Page, it is important that:
- The title ( tag <title> in the source code or HTML) is relevant to the search term. And more importantly, that the term is mentioned at the beginning of the title. In case of being a very long title, the first words of it must be the keyword.
- The keywords must also appear in the titles and subtitles of the content, and each one must be correctly tagged with h1, h2, h3 (in the HTML)
- By using words in bold, it will be very good that those words are relevant to the keywords.
- Keywords are used in the texts of the links inside and outside our site.
- Good normal (but not excessive) use of keywords is made in the text of the page.
4. Polishing the PageRank:
It is a quality parameter designed by Google. Equivalent to zero for new domains. PageRank (PR) is the level of “importance” of each page and domain, and this level depends on the number of links it receives from important pages. Basically, the more PageRank we have, the more times Google will show us in search results, more times you will examine our content and when comparing our content with that of others, ours will be favored if our PageRank is the highest.
- There are ways to tell Google which pages to look out for are the most important.
- These pages should be the Landing Pages that I mentioned in the previous point.
- To get a good PR, the link text (anchor text) to our Landing Pages is key. Said anchor texts must contain the keywords of that Landing Page, but they must not always be exactly the keywords but also similar and relevant terms, which are also called long-tail keywords.
- Another way to polish the PR is by optimizing to appear higher in search results where, naturally, our page already appears in the top 10 of Google.
It is proven that more than 50% of people who search for information on Google click on the first and second results, almost 25% on the third and 25% on the rest of the results. Therefore, appearing in the first Google results is essential.
To know in which searches we appear above in a natural way, we can use tools such as Moz or Semrush, among others.
5. Our Links Profile:
If until a few years ago what mattered to position itself was the amount of links we received from other websites, over time the Google algorithm got better and better and began to take into account the quality of those links, that is, the quality of the domains pointing to us.
In the algorithmic updates of the last 2 years, Google has further improved its ability to detect “spam” sites, created for the sole purpose of positioning, and began to measure not only the profile of links that reach our domain but also the Profile of the links that we send out (external links), as well as the relationship between both links.
In other words, the ideal would be not to have outgoing links in order to cultivate a higher PR, but Google sees this as a bad practice, so it is better to have outgoing links to relevant sites, which really allow the visitor to learn more about our themes, but always keeping a limit on the amount of external links we have. Preferably, the number of external links should not exceed 10% of the number of links I receive from outside.
6. Backlinks and more backlinks!
Google is becoming more and more semantic, that is why it is very important that the links to our site come from sites and pages relevant to our field and topics, for example, if our site is about clothing, a link from a site that specializes in leather it will be much more valuable than a link from a page that deals with car insurance. The links have to be from web pages with themes similar to ours: from domains that have our keywords in the domain, or from articles that contain our keywords in the title or in the text. The content that joins in the link that comes to us. That it contains the keywords, that it does not point only to our Homepage, and that it really provides the user with some informative value.Nowadays it is very easy to be penalized by Google for buying or renting links, or even for receiving a large amount of links from sites that are not in any way relevant to ours.
7. Building a strong and healthy backlink profile:
Getting links to our own website (backlinks) is a very complicated task that requires a lot of precision and creativity. The most important thing is to always know how to maintain a high standard. One good quality backlink is better than a hundred low quality ones. Good quality backlinks include:
- Press releases
- Public Relations
- Link exchanges with websites with similar themes
- Link request
- Offer an RSS feed – It is not always recommended since we would not have much control over the location of our links.
- Creating controversial articles, for people to link, comment and share on social networks and on their own sites.
- Until a few years ago, writing posts and comments on other people’s sites and blogs as a “guest writer” was a very common modality, but it was decreasing as Google began to report that this technique would no longer work for SEO.
8. The Content
- Content is, has been and always will be King. It is extremely important to offer good quality content, because it generates engagement and makes people link to you naturally.
- In addition, the frequency with which it is published is important. Don’t learn from me, I publish an article every 14 months or so! 🙂 If the content is updated very frequently, the Google bot may visit you more frequently, and there are also great chances that it will index you higher and for more terms, even in long-tail terms that are related to your content but haven’t been mentioned on your website.
9. Social Networks Life Signs
Social networks have more and more weight for the Google algorithm and I believe that they will be more and more important.
Your brand, business or name need to be present on social networks: it is always good to have a profile on the most important networks such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and Instagram.
It is also important who your target audience is. If they are 65-year-old adults, they will not be present in the same networks attended by young people between 15 and 20 years old.
Our actions on social networks will aim to gain more followers and quality contacts who visit our page and eventually generate some type of conversion.
The quality of the followers is more important than the quantity. If you plan to buy followers, it is preferable to think about how to invest that money and time to generate good content that naturally attracts them.
10. Local and Mobile SEO
More and more people search from mobile, so it is essential to offer a mobile version of your website. Google has already reported that it will soon begin to manage two separate indexes: one for search results for desktop users (PC) and another for mobile users. It is very convenient to introduce our brand or business in Google Places, to appear higher in local searches. It is good for receiving relevant visits close to your physical location, and we will generally have a much higher conversion rate with those types of visits.
Bonus #11: Be Patient!
After doing everything mentioned on this list, wait! Unfortunately there is no magic button that you press and automatically become first in Google. The Google directory takes time to compare your content, the general structure of your site, your links and the quality of your work, with that of other competitors. So it is necessary to be patient and wait for the Google algorithm to work so that your website rises in Google’s organic results.
All of this can take months, sometimes more than a year. That is why it is always good to simultaneously consider other online marketing techniques, such as PPC advertising in Google Adwords, which I have talked about and will talk about in other articles, as a short and medium term investment that will help generate traffic to your site. faster.
The list that I have presented here, has been designed to describe some of the most important factors of SEO, from researching the terms and phrases (keywords) that generate traffic to our website, to how to make our site friendly with search engines, as well as building links and marketing the unique value of the page and domain.
Finally, if you feel that all this information overwhelms you, don’t worry, I am here to help you! 🙂