Why do I need to be first? You maybe asking yourself "Do I really need to be first?" Well, in a study by Eye Tools, they found that the place most people look when they search on Google is the top spot and fewer look further down.
So to get noticed you really need the top spot.
To find out more about the study visit eyetools.
com Accessibility This is one of the most important things when it comes to getting top position.
This is because if your site is not accessible then search engine spiders will not be able to crawl your site properly so the spiders might just ignore parts/all of your site.
This can seriously hurt your position.
The things you need to check are: oBroken Links If your site has broken links then it will be ranked lower.
To check for broken links I recommend you use a piece of software like Xenu's Link Sleuth.
This will check your site for any broken links and it can also check your external links as well.
When you find broken links, fix them immediately so you don't forget.
oForm submissions, select boxes and javascript Try to keep these to a minimum or don't use them at all if possible.
This is due to search engine spiders not being able to follow the links.
So they may never get indexed unless you directly link to them.
oFile size Try to keep the size of your web pages to a minimum because with most search engines, pages over 150KB will not be cached fully.
Also keeping the file size down will increase your page loading speed which will keep your visitors happy.
oSite performance You're ranking in Google can be affected if your site has a lot of downtime or if the performance of your server is poor.
So pay that little extra for a good host.
At the moment my site, ReviewCore.
co.
uk is hosted with Streamline.
net who up to now have been very good with no downtime and very fast speeds.
Backlinks These will really help your position and your page rank.
But not just any backlinks will do.
They have to be from respectable sites and not link farms.
Also try to get backlinks from high page rank sites but Google will only count these if they are clicked.
So a clicked backlink on a site with medium page rank would be better than a backlink on a high page rank site that is ignored.
A good way of getting good backlinks is to write articles with a link to your site on it and submit it to article directories and other websites.
URL length Try to limit your URLs to no more than 2 dynamic parameters.
If you don't know what a dynamic parameter is then here are some examples: n=3031001 v=glance categoryid=145 If you're URLs contain more than 2 dynamic parameters they may not be spidered.
Meta tags These are the most important things when it comes to getting to the top.
Meta tags should be laid out as follows: Site Title Description Keywords Author Copyright Reply-To Content-Language Resource-type Content-Type Distribution Robots Always put the title first so that it is not missed by the search engine spider and don't over do it with the keywords because this can hurt your ranking instead of helping it.
Meta tag lengths:Title - 6 to 10 wordsDescription - no more than 200 charactersKeywords - between 200 and 500 characters Content Make sure your sites content is original and not copied because Google will penalize your site or totally ignore it if they find too much copied content.
Also keep you content fresh.
This will keep visitors coming back to your site and if they like it they will link back which helps your ranking.
Another good idea is to try and get as many of your keywords in your content as possible because this can help towards that top spot.
But don't do things like text the same colour as background as Google doesn't look kindly on this and you could be ignored or even banned.
Outbound links The quality of your outbound links also affects your position because if you link to sites associated with gambling, porn, spam, etc then Google will think that the content of your site is to do with those kinds of topics and you may not be ranked very high.
Try to link to sites that are relevant to yours as this will help Google figure out your sites topic.
Follow these steps and you should be right at the top of Google in no time.