How to Get to the Top of Google

If you're doing business online you need traffic - human visitors coming to your website, viewing what you have to offer, and making a purchase of your products or services. The way that most potential customers find your business is through a Search Engine such as Google. Those businesses that occupy the first ranking position on the first page on Google are more likely to get a greater share of traffic than those that are further down the first page, or even worse, on another page.

No one can guarantee that you're going to get to Number 1, the top spot on Google. However, many people do achieve the top position on Google and other search engines through hard work, persistence and the right knowledge. So what factors can help you to get to the top of Google?

REPUTATION: Your reputation comes from what Google and other reputable sites think of your site and its content. Google really care about reputation and those sites that make it to the top of Google are considered to be the best and most reputable for that search term.

Reputation is created through good practice. Your reputation can easily be damaged through poor hosting, lack of branded domain name, swathes of unoriginal content and so-called black hat SEO techniques. Keeping a relevant blog, providing relevant articles or information, linking to reputable sites and having those sites link to you are ways to develop a positive reputation with Google.

AGE: This refers to age of your site, or most often, the age of the domain registration. If you're planning to start a new website, it's often better to get the website registered before you start working on the site. This way, Google values the age of the site from it's registration date, not from the time that you start filling the site with content.

LINKS: Google likes you to be popular in order to place you top of their rankings. If your website receives lots of links from sites that operate with relevant areas to your own website content, then Google smiles upon you. This type of link is sometimes known as an inbound or incoming link. Although not as valued as inbound links, outbound links (those you make from your site to others) are also helpful to your ranking. Again these are tested by Google for their relevancy to your website subject matter and their own reputation and quality.

CONTENT: Google's spider crawlers that 'read' the web actually assess and evaluate the quality of the content of your website. They know if you've endlessly repeated text, if you've just copied content from somewhere else and if you've overstuffed your content with keywords. Google likes high quality content that's fresh, relevant and original.

These four areas all help Google to create a perspective on your website. If Google has a negative opinion of your website and its content, you'll have to work very hard to get a positive one. If you want to get to the top of Google, you'll need to continually work on all four of these areas to obtain and maintain the top spot on Google.

Ben Norman is a UK Based SEO Expert and Google Consultant who specialises in helping businesses to significantly improve their online visibility.