Getting to the Top of Web Search Results on Google

Getting to the top of web search results on Google can pay off big for your business. One way to boost your business  is to attract online searchers seeking a service you don’t even offer.

Begin by researching which keywords potential customers use in online searches. Suppose your company only replaces parts  for products rather than doing repairs, but most of the people are searching for the keyword “repair” of those products. There maybe a potential to turn people searching for “repair” into customers. Prospects will find your website only if it uses the same terminology as they do and  testing hundreds of propositions about what will land a site a top Google ranking for a given search term.

As a example, take two important keywords “auto shop” and auto repair shop” as well as “muffler repair”. The tactics to use include building more links with sites run by “friendlies”, such as suppliers and distributors with whom you do business; adding relevant content to the home page, and improving linking structure among pages on the site.

Customer’s Lingo: It’s highly likely your prospects use at least some search terms you don’t use internally. To discover the terms your potential clients use,  brainstorm possibilities in-house and phone clients to ask how they search for what you sell. Then select “Get keyword ideas” at Google.com/adwords and enter a search string. You will see plenty of variations, with the latest monthly search totals for each one.

A Page for Each Popular Keyword: After identifying commonly used keywords, pick the most widely used ones relevant to what you sell, look for ones with commercial intent. If someone searches for “oil” ,it is too generic. But if they search for “oil removal” , there is commercial intent behind it. Create a landing page with rich content about the most popular keyword; then the second-most popular and so on.

Google’s Trust: search engine ranks pages more highly if it trusts them to deliver content relevant to users’ searches. It trusts a given page more as the page ages, provided it has links with other sites that Google’s algorithms suggest have relevant related content. By altering a page’s URL or even just changing the suffix  from ‘html’ to ‘php’, that becomes a new page, which has no age, no links and no trust. Setup a “301 redirect” for every renamed page.

Google’s Trust for the Home Page: Google trusts home pages more than other pages because they tend to have most links. How do you maximize your home page advantage by featuring lots of relevant content without compromising speed. You should run only the first few lines of each article on your home page with a “Read more”  button and the rest of the article on another page. Google indexes the entite content as if it was on the home page.

Location: Customers for a wide array of goods and services prefer to buy from a company with a nearby location. For any category in which Google figures searches are likely to care about where a seller is, it first uses the searcher’s URL to determine his location. Then a Google map is displayed on the top right of the first page of the search results showing the closest businesses matching his keywords even if he omits a location. Businesses should claim their Google Places listing.

Power of Google Places: Buy  a small Yellow Pages display ad, Google uses Yellow Pages listings as the basis  for Places and trusts them to confirm that you run  a real business. You will rank well only if you format your firm’s contact information identically in  Places and in the Yellow Pages. Also use all five categories for listing your offerings. You can also ask a few non-competing nearby businesses to add a page to their sites recommending your firm, in return for reciprocating. Google sees such “local citations”  as confirmation that a company has  a good local reputation.

Google Places and Organic Searches: Google now combines the ranking points from both so that each type of search affects the other. For any company where geography matters, it’s now essential to optimize your ranking for both.

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