Page 1 of Google: if Flossie can get there, so can you
By
|
February 17, 2013
By
|
February 17, 2013
.'Tisthe Holy Grail, the place all businesses want to get to, the place all businesses want to stay.
Well, unless their CFO has been in court recently for mishandling farmyard animals...
"I only hopped over the fence to relieve myself after a few at The Crown and she backed onto me, m'lud. She's a frisky one, that Flossie."
[caption id="attachment_2217" align="alignnone" width="307"]
Flossie minding her own business just a few hours before kicking out time at The Crown last Tuesday night.[/caption]
I digress (as usual).This blog post is not about sheep, fuddled CFOs and fluffy lust, its purpose is to help you understand how getting onto the top table of search isn't as hard as most SEOs, quite deliberately, make it out to be.
You could say it's a living, breathing example of how a post should be structured to get to the first page of Google's organic search results (minus the Flossie bit, maybe).
Oh, and in this case, just to make it a real challenge, the keyphrase I'm targeting is
, so it's game on.
Let's see if we get there.
So how do you rise to the heavenly vault of search?
As well as writing interesting stuff that people want to read, and ideally share (social sharing is increasingly a ranking factor for the search engines), it's essential that you optimise your blog content as best you can.
What do I mean by this?
Optimising content means giving your content the best possible chance of getting ranked well by Google because you're communicating with Google in the crystal-clear language it likes.
Now while nobody knows the exact algorithm Google uses (and it's always changing anyway), it's widely accepted that thereare some things, the bare basics of optimisation, that you have to get into the habit of doing each time you post content.
So what are the bare basics? Look no further: here they are, all five of them!
[caption id="attachment_2273" align="alignnone" width="523"]
The keyphrase is in the page title (in blue), the URL (green) and the meta description (black)[/caption]
With these five fundamental optimisation techniques, you're basically shouting out to Google that here's what this page is about, now come over and look at me.
Think of them as a megaphone to make your voice as loud as possible in order to catch the search engines' attention and fast-track you to Page 1.
You could go on and on with optimisation techniques. But I won't as I'll get as bored as you will.
If you're still mad enough to be reading this post, though, here are a few more and then let's call it a day.
If you found this post vaguely interesting, you may want to check out this other post by yours truly on
, which offers more tips that work for me.
It was the first vaguely sensible post I wrote on how to rank high on Google and despite the fact this blog as a whole is more about PR and, errr,
than it is SEO and CMO (content marketing optimisation), it instantly made Page 1 of Google for 'Getting to Page 1 of Google'.
I didn't think that was bad at all.
(The search below was carried out in Incognito mode on Google Chrome).
[caption id="attachment_2248" align="alignnone" width="447"]
Page 1 of Google for 'Getting to Page 1 of Google'. OK, it's a long tail query and I'm only result 5 but that's still not bad for a blog that's not purely focused on SEO and CMO.[/caption]
If you're sick to death of me, and why wouldn't you be this far down the post, check out this article on
by Jason Acidre of Kaiserthesage.
It's more technical than this one because he appears to know what he's on about and I haven't got a clue.
Saying that, I'd appreciate it if you could tweet or like this post, using those daft little icons and gubbinses below.
As I see it, the sooner smaller businesses understand that they can make page one of Google themselves without shelling out several grand a month to some smooth-talking SEO outfit, the better.
Blogging well can get you there, alone. And seriously quick.
