If you are not sure ‘How to Rank on Google’ then read these Renegade Business Bullets…
These Business Renegade Bullets aim to demystify the process of getting your web pages to rank on Google or in the other free listings of the search engines.
Within this article I am assuming that your site has something of value to offer. If it doesn’t, then you can forget everything else.
Many marketing companies and SEO specialists contact small business owners with a marketing ‘hook’ by saying ‘we will get you to number one on Google’. This is often a con because they are playing on the ignorance of the business owner.
It is relatively easy to get a number one position on Google for a keyword that will attract low traffic and which therefore has low competition. The return on your investment will likely be zero or worse.
‘Keywords’ are the search terms put into Google (or any other search engine) by people looking for information or a solution.
So the first Business Renegade bullet is:
Keyword Research & Search Term Selection
Some SEO experts believe that 20% of your time investment should be spent on keyword research because it is totally pointless trying to rank for a keyword or search term that has no or very low traffic, or, if successful, has low propensity to convert to a sale or has many powerful competitors.
This is the point where many small businesses fail i.e. at the first hurdle. They simply don’t have the time or skills to do the keyword research to know what keywords they can compete on to attract traffic for their web pages.
Let me give you an example. As a printer, it would probaby be very difficult to get onto the first page of Google for the keyword ‘printer’. It would be slightly easier to compete for ‘business cards’, easier still to compete for ‘business card printing’ and easier still to compete for ‘online business card printing’.
I have recently bought a piece of software online called Market Samurai costing around £60 that automates much of the donkey work required on keyword research. Within seconds, for any keyword or search term, it will show you the amount of traffic, the value of the keyword and it’s competitiveness.
The software will even enable you to research the top ten websites for each keyword so you can determine how easy it will be to get onto the first page of Google, thereby saving you wasted time in ‘beating your head against a brick wall’.
So assuming you have completed the first task of selecting your keyword or search term, the second Business Renegade bullet is:
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
There is a lot of misinformation and mystique about this phrase. SEO simply means that you have to put your keywords in the right places on your web pages with the right formatting.
By doing this it will enable the search engine spiders to assess the relevance of your web page content to the keyword or search term.
You should have no more than one or two keywords or search terms that you are optimising on any web page. But where should these search terms go exactly? Read slowly because the next few lines represent most of what you need to know about SEO.
The search terms should go:
- In your pages TITLE tag
- In the META tags re ‘keywords’ and ‘description’
- In a heading tag (H1, H2 or H3) near the top of your page
- In the first paragraph of your content and repeated one or two times more on the page
- In any links back to your page i.e. link back through the keyword or seach term i.e. if your keyword is ‘printing’, the link should be through the keyword ‘printing’.
Taking it one stage further, if your keywords are in your domain name this is even better. With domain names costing very little, compared to the potential pay-back for a good keyword, this is not as silly as it sounds.
The final Business Renegade bullet is:
Building Links To Your Web Page
Having established the relevance of your web page through the keywords, through the number and quality of links from other web pages back to yours, the search engine spiders will now assign a priority or ‘ranking’ to your web page i.e. the number and quality of links are used as a kind of ‘vote’ as to the quality of the content on your page.
The quality of the page that ‘casts the vote’ is also counted. The willingness of other sites to link to yours will depend on the quality of the content on your site.
Also, let’s not lose sight of the fact that links are another way for people to find your valuable content.
Links can be achieved in 3 basic ways:
- By submitting your site to major on-line directories – some are free and some want payment
- By swapping links with related websites
- By asking other sites that have resource directories to link to you
A solid linking strategy requires time and work. The most crucial factor is the quality of your content as, over time, as people find and appreciate your value they will want to link to your material.
Getting a large number of back links may not be as difficult as it first appears. For example, if you have 10 articles and place them on each of 5 article sites with back links to your site. Assuming that just 20 people back link from each article per annum, over 5 years you can build 1,000 back links. If you can create a lot more quality content, then the numbers start to mount up.
Linking is a big topic and it is worth carrying out further research on this area if you are serious about on-line marketing. Invest in books or search for information online – there are a number of good websites such as www.linkingmatters.com.
Market Samurai will show you how many backlinks the web sites have (and their quality) on the front page of Google for any keyword or search term – sometimes this can be daunting but, again, it is better to know what you are facing by way of competition than to waste your time on the impossible.
To summarise:
To rank highly on Google, you need high quality content that is relevant to the keywords you have researched. You then need to make sure that the web page is optimised with those keywords and that you have a strategy for building links back to your web pages using those keywords.
Encapsulated in those few words is most of what it takes for Business Renegades to rank on Google.
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