Why is ranking first on google important?
Do you have a website? Do you want to make money with it? Then you need traffic to your website. Do you know what is the best source of free traffic? Google. Google is the best source of free traffic for pretty much any website on earth.
But how do you do that? How do you get the free traffic on google? How do you get google to send people your way? The way you do this is by ranking first page on google. When you get your website or even just a single web page to rank on google first page, you will get a lot of people coming your way. When people search google they normally click the first second or third link on google. This means that if you can get your link as one of those top 3 you will get a lot of people coming to your website.
However, you need to note that its not just about getting any link to rank on google. But to rank for keywords that actually get traffic. You will need to do some keyword analysis to find out the best performing keywords and then write content for it. Something else you need to note is that you are not the only one trying to rank for that keyword. There are so many people allover the world who are doing the same thing that you are doing.
Now lets go through all the things you need to do to rank first on google.
1. Keyword Research.
The very first step of ranking on google is by doing a keyword research. You cannot know where you are writing for if you do not know what is your target. So first you need to start with researching on the keywords that you want to write for.
You need to research on the long-tail keywords which involve long keywords. You know long statements for things that people search for. This is easier to rank since longer keywords have less competition. In addition to that, the long keywords are very specific hence easy to rank.
You also need to research on the short-tail keywords. These are the short keywords that people search for. This usually involves one word or two or three words keywords. These keywords are harder to rank. In addition to that they are very competitive. However, the advantage of that is that it has a lot of traffic. If you rank for such a keyword, you will get a lot of traffic.
Other things that you need to d0 is to do competitors keyword analysis. This involves analyzing what keywords your competition is ranking for.
2. On-Page SEO Optimization.
On-Page SEO involves all the things that you do on your website such as writing content and images to rank for.
Some of the things you need to do for on-page seo is optimizing your titles. You need to make sure that every title of every page and blogpage is well optimized with keywords. Make sure that the keywords are included in the title but do not overdo it.
You need to include a keyword optimized meta description. Meta description is the text snippet that google displays on SERPs. Do not ignore it. Optimize it with keywords.
Mkae good use of header tags from H1, H2, H3,… Also make sure that you do them hierarchically. Do not jump from H1 to H3 skipping H2. Also make sure that the H1 is the title of your page/article. Also note that there can be only one H1 per page. You cannot have multiple H1s as they are meant for titles.
Url structure also forms part of on-page seo. Make sure that the links on all your website as well as your page are well organized. Make good use of things like the menu and the footer to include your most useful links. In addition to that, make good use of internal linking to link to other articles and pages relevant to the reader.
Use optimized and compressed images. Also make sure that you use alt text so as to inform google what the image is all about.
3. Make Great content for your website.
You cannot rank on google if you do not make great content. You cannot defeat your competitors if your content is not the best. Make sure that every article you make carries the most value for your readers.
Make sure that the grammar is correct. In addition to that make sure that you maintain a flesch ease of reading score greater than 65.
Do not use AI to generate your content for your website. Believe me, google hates that. We know because we have tried it.
Do not use automated content generators such as Article Spinners and article re-writers. This is low quality, poor content that will hurt your SEO.
You need to exercise E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) for all the articles that you write on your website. Let your articles portray your expertise in the field, show authority in the sense that you are sure of what you are talking about and finally be trustworthy.
Avoid plagiarism. Please do not copy other peoples work or duplicate other websites content. Plagiarism will get google to drop your ranking. That is in addition to other problems such as copyright infringement problems.
Make long articles but not too long. Anything longer than 700 words to 2800 words is good.
4. Technical SEO.
Technical SEO involves all the things you do to rank your website off your webpages/website. Normally this is done on third parties such as getting backlinks from other websites.
You need to make your webpages and the entire website Mobile-friendliness. This means that your webpages load and display well on small screens such as smartphones.
You need to make sure that your website pages load fast. This involves Page speed optimization. Such things involve caching, optimizing images, compressing images, using advanced image formats such as .webp, using CDNs, having a fast server/hosting, properly optimized small code, deferring loading of resources, async loading of resources and so much more.
You need to make sure that your website is loading through SSL. All urls must be loading through HTTPS protocol.
You need to generate XML sitemaps and robots.txt. These files are very important in guiding google robots on how to interact with your website.
Make good use of Structured data (Schema Markup) on your website and webpages. For example if your website has job postings, you need to use Structured data to let google know that it is a job posting.
5. Build backlinks for your website.
Backlinks are super important to google. I cannot over emphasize on how important backlinks are to google. You need to have good backlinks for your website to rank on google. Actually, you will realize that all the websites ranking first page on google have a lot of backlinks. You can use guestposting to do backlinks building. Do not buy backlinks.
6. Do not ignore the User Interface UI and User experience UX.
One thing that some webmasters forget is the UI/UX. What they do not realize is that google also cares about UI/UX. Therefore do not ignore the UI/UX of your website and webpages. Make sure that the users have a smooth experience on your website. Make sure that everything works properly.
7. Do not ignore social media. Focus on social signals & brand authority.
Google checks the social media activities of the website to make sure that they are active. If you have very active social media with lot of engagement, then google considers your business active business. When it considers your business as active, then it ranks it better.
8. Try Local SEO.
Try local seo especially if your business is a local business. For example, if your business is a local restaurant, then make sure you do local seo because all your customers are local. You do not expect customers to come from Russia when your restaurant is in New York.
Conclusion.
We have tried to keep this as short and minimal as possible to guide you on what you can do to rank your website on google. Go through each point carefully and do it meticulously for your website.
The last thing you need to remember is that SEO is not a one day thing. It is not a quick thing and it takes a lot of time to rank on google. So keep persistent until you get there.
