Search Engine Page One Rankings

So you want to secure a page one ranking on Google, Yahoo! or Bing – easier said than done. While first page rankings for non-competitive terms can be achieved with little hardship (typically a keyword rich domain name, solid page title, and relevant content will suffice), accomplishing the same for heavily combative words and phrases requires a comprehensive strategy and a great deal of patience.

Before embarking on your search engine optimization campaign, it’s important you realize that changes must be implemented over a period of time. Seldom does anyone rank on page one by performing a complete overhaul in a matter of hours or days. Search engines are suspicious of too much action on a site, which generally leads to penalization.

If your web site still isn’t landing page 1 rankings after perfecting your page titles and descriptions, then you should undertake a link building campaign. Back links from respectable sites will increase your natural page rank. This is rewarded by search engines because quality links directed to your site are endorsements that valuable content exists there. It takes time for other web sites to link to you by the merits of your content, so streamline the process by submitting your web site to relevant web directories and take some time to learn how keyword anchor text links improve rankings. Learn more about buildings links through social media optimization as well.

Still can’t rank on page one? Consider uploading an on-page and an xml sitemap to your web site. These assist the search engine bots, or spiders, when they crawl your site to index what information and content lies there (note: typically the more often you add new content, the more often the bots will be sent out to your site). You should also add internal navigation links. Most web sites feature links in sidebars, headers, and footers, but engraining links in content with descriptive keywords helps even more.

If these techniques don’t propel you to page one rankings you might want to reevaluate what keywords and phrases you are targeting. If you are attempting to rank for “web design company” but find it’s much too competitive, then refine the term with geographic references. This should increase your targeted traffic. That way you can at least rank on page one for some terms until your web site grows. Even if you don't rank on the first page of Google,  you can use these tips to acquire links that will improve your page rank.

Lastly, if you are trying to get a first page SERP ranking for your blog, look for ways to improve your website visibility and get hyperlinks from related websites.