Thursday, May 8, 2008

How To Get A Top 10 Listing With Google

By Lucas Heijn

When you set up a shop you need customers to be successful. Every person that walks in through your door is a potential customer. The more traffic you have through that door the more chance you have of making sales. On the internet it is the same. To get that traffic to your site you either advertise using PPC and or optimize your site to get search engine traffic.

Seeing as how a lot of your business will come through the search engines you need to make sure that you are listed in the top 10 or 20; Basically the first two pages. Here are some of the things you must do:

Choose The Right Keywords

What keywords to use, that is the question. You need to look for keywords that have a good number of searches each month and not too much competition. Too much competition will make it impossible to achieve your goal of achieving the top 10 listing in the search engine results.

Look for long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are keyword phrases of from 3 - 5 words. In your research you will need to look at how many searches are made on that phrase as you will need to have a reasonable amount of searches. You also need to note how much competition that phrase has. If there are too many trying for that phrase it will be better to choose another; One that you can get to the top 10.

Optimize Your Website

The title tag on you page is the most important tag. This is what Google uses for its listings. This tag is very important in Google's listings.

In setting up this tag, you need to use the keyword phrase that your research has helped you to choose. It is best to have this phrase come up early in your title tag. If you can use it twice in the tag, do so. You MUST use it at least once in this tag.

Another thing that is important is that you have a unique new tag for each page of your site optimized with your keyword phrase.

Using an XML Sitemap can be helpful. It does not directly impact on your search rankings but it will help Google more quickly see changes in your site.

Robots.txt is also very useful. This is the first file the Google Bot will look for. It will also help eliminate 404 error pages.

These are just a few of the thing you can and should do to help your page rankings and thus your listing position in the search engines. There are a lot of other thing you can do but they will have to be the subject of another article.

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