Google Top Listing - 3 Steps to a Top Listing on Google

Most people know that getting your website listed on the first page of Google is an absolute must if you want to get significant traffic to your site. However most people have no idea how to do this. You can pay a lot of money to get a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) company to do it for you, but in most cases this is not necessary.

With a little effort you can easily get your site listed on the first page of Google for next to nothing and enjoy the benefits of a constant stream of targeted traffic to your website. I have done this many times for my own, and many friends and colleagues' websites. If you follow the steps below you can't go wrong.

So what are the basic steps you need to take?

1) Find the best search terms to get listed for.

This step is often overlooked but is actually the most important step. It's no use getting a top listing on Google for a search term that nobody uses. Likewise a top listing for a search term that isn't totally relevant to your site isn't going to do you any good, no matter how many people are searching on it.

Google has a tool that allows you find out the number of people who are searching on any given word or phrase. You can then find the phrases that are a) highly relevant to your site and b) will attract the most searches.

To access this tool simply type "Google keyword tool" into Google and click on the top listing.

Note: Try to pick the less competitive keywords. The are often the ones that contain 2 or 3 words. They will be much easier to get a top listing Google for. The "advertiser competition" bar in the left hand column of the Google keyword tool gives you an idea of this.

2) Pepper your website with the phrases you identified above.

This step is called "on-page optimization" and tells Google which search terms to list your website for. You must limit the number of search terms you want to get a top listing for to 2 or 3 per page of your website.

The 3 most important places you must include your key phrases are

- Your URL (website Address) eg. yourkeywords.com/more-keywords-here

- Your title tag. This is a simple piece of HTML code that's located in the "head," or top, of your Web page.
Within the source of your web page, it looks something like this:
{title}Insert keyword-rich site description here{/title}

If you don't know how to edit your website your web designer can change your title tags very easily.

- Your website copy - placing your keywords throughout the text in your website is vital if you want a top listing for those keywords.

3) Get links pointing to your website from other relevant and high ranking websites

Getting links to your site is essential for getting a top listing. This tells Google that your site is popular and valued by other sites. But it's not the number of links that is the most important factor. It's the quality of the links. Quality links come from sites that have a high listing in Google themselves and are relevant to your site. Its no good getting links from low ranking sites or sites that have nothing to do with yours. This can actually hurt your ranking.

The 3 best places to get links from are:

- Directory sites that relate to your subject - do a search using the word "directory" and your keywords to find these.

- Article sites: These are sites where you can publish informative articles about your subject and get a link back to your site. Google values these links very highly. The best article submission site is ezinearticles.com.

- Online discussion forums and groups that relate to your subject. Post a useful comment on a forum and use your website link as signature. Do not overtly promote your website here though as you may get banned from the forum and get your posts removed.

Note:

Google may take a few weeks to register your links and push you up the listings. If you have followed all the steps above just keep adding links and you will see your site move up to the top of the listings.

Michael Arnold in the founder of the website Top Google Listing. He gives free advice and training on how to get a Google top listing for any website.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Michael_J_Arnold