Hey, everybody! I hope you are all keeping safe and well. Do you know how to get to the front page of Google?
Today, I wanted to keep this theme of writing about the processes that I am currently going through myself. One of the first main tasks that I always work on when creating a new website is conducting a technical site audit of every page and its content.
This is always really important because this allows you to go through the website and pick up any issues that may cause problems for Google’s crawler.
But, let’s start at the basics!
What is SEO?
Firstly, I think I should tell you what SEO is.
“SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.”
I found this great definition from MOZ, cheers guys!
There are three main parts that makeup SEO:
- Organic traffic: This is the people who come across your site naturally through Google’s search engine. This means no ads were involved!
- Quality of traffic: This means that the traffic that you get to your website is genuine and are interested in your product. If you are getting lots of traffic but no one is staying on your website for more than 10 seconds then there wasn’t any reason to have them in the first place.
- Quantity of traffic: But when you are getting genuine interest in your site then the quantity becomes important because, well, more is better.
Trying to get to the front page of Google without optimising your website you might as well be rowing a boat up a waterfall.
It’s impossible!
How search engine optimisation works
You might think of a search engine as a website you visit to type a question into a box and Google, Yahoo!, Bing, or whatever search engine you’re using magically replies with a long list of links to webpages that could potentially answer your question.
That’s true. But have you ever stopped to consider what’s behind those magical lists of links?
Here’s how it works: Google (or any search engine you’re using) has a crawler that goes out and gathers information about all the content they can find on the Internet. The crawlers bring all those 1s and 0s back to the search engine to build an index. That index is then fed through an algorithm that tries to match all that data with your query.
So, how can I get to the front page of Google?
To get to the front page of google you need to look at a combination of different areas.
Let’s get into it!
Link building: site and page
Link building is a strategy that is very important in boosting your search visibility. Link building is the process of getting other websites to link back to your website. It is arguably the most important piece of SEO that a business owner can build their site’s authority.
Essentially, the best way to build the authority of a site on the web is by having other websites that have a good authority to link to your site. The higher the site that has linked to your site the faster that your own website shoots up the rankings. For example, if another digital marketing blog that has just began posting links to this website it would get a small boost. But, if the BBC or any other high ranking website links to this website I would get a very large boost and Google will recognise this website as being trustworthy. In turn, Runaway Digital would be seen on the front page of Google more often.
Keywords
Keywords, I would say, is the easiest to understand concept here so I’m not going to be spending long talking about it!
Keywords are how Google and other search engines categorise your posts by putting essentially a “tag” on it. This means when someone might search a specific topic Google will look for all content with the same keywords as the query.
For example, if someone wanted to search something about blog topics, Google may bring up our last article about the very same subject.
The tricky part about keywords isn’t incorporating them into the text but is the research itself. But that is a much larger topic that deserves its own article entirely.
Quality content
Remember how I said earlier that Google loves showing websites that have a high domain authority? Well, Google also loves showing content that it deems to be original.
This is because out of the millions of blogs about the same topics Google wants to show you those that are wholly original and not just copy and pastes of other websites.
Meta titles and descriptions
Meta titles and meta descriptions are what you see when you Google a question. Essentially, they are the first impression you have when Google adds you to their front page.
These are really important because they involve the human element of SEO. If your meta titles and descriptions are uninformative and don’t aid the consumer Google will penalise your pages. So, it is very important to have these include your keyword and be descriptive.
End.
That’s it, folks! This blog ended up a bit longer than I was expecting but that’s the basic overview of how to get to the front page of Google.
I will be going into more detail about all of the techniques etc on here in separate blog posts. Frankly, I could have written thousands of words about each of the topics discussed because of all of the different nuances of each one!
If you would like me to discuss something specific that I haven’t mentioned here give me an email at ben@runaway-digital.com.
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