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By Les Scammell, February 12, 2010 1:22 am

Everyone’s dream – getting their post, or page, onto the front page of Google. Yet, in reality, it’s not that hard. You need to think like the search engines and like those who are going to enter a search phrase and it all starts with your post or page title.

It has often been said that the title to a post (or page) is very important and should contain the keywords. If you think about it for a moment, the first thing the search engine sees, apart from the URL, is the post (page) title. The content should then back up that title.  Your title tells the search engine what your post is all about. That is why keywords are important.

What are search engines looking for, unique content. So start with a unique title. Write your title then ‘Google-it’. When you do a search, do an exact search using the inverted commas around the title. I did a search for “How To Get Your Post On Page One Of Google” and found there were no other pages at all that matched that search phrase – I have  a unique title.

Once you have done your search using quotes, do a search without the quotes. Now how many pages are returned in the results. You will see below the search box something like – results 1-10 of about xxxxx. If this number runs to millions, you know you are going to battle to get to number one. Play around with the title, keeping it unique but seeing if you can get those search numbers down. The fewer pages listed, the less competition.

Will this guarantee me a page one listing? Sorry, there are no guarantees. However, for that search phrase, you should by rights be on the front page of the search results. Give your post a few days to become indexed (or hurry it along a little by bookmarking or tweeting it) then check the search results for the title. You may just find you are on page one. Not necessarily for your keywords on their own  – but it’s a start.

Over time you may become smarter at writing titles that actually closely match search terms being used. Searchers are becoming smarter and starting to use smarter search terms. The title of this  post should perhaps have been written from the searchers perspective, How Do I Get My Post On Page One Of Google since they are the types of searches being entered.

Page one of Google just because you used a smart post title. Can it be that easy? I’ll report back in a day or two to let you know if this post makes it to number one!

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By Les Scammell, January 25, 2010 4:01 pm

Another post on Small Business Mavericks caught my eye this morning so thought I would follow up on what the latest gossip was on the topic. The post – How Your Meta Description Will Help You Rank Higher – reminded me of how I almost doubled my traffic on one of my blogs just by beefing up the meta description.

Meta descriptions are used by the search engines as the snippet when your site appears in the search results – sometimes. That is often the problem. Google for one will decide on the text for the snippet. From what I can gather, it will look at the meta description tag but if it decides its not appropriate then it will find text that is, often from the first paragraph. (So make your first paragraph an extension or new version of your meta description perhaps?).

The latest comes from Chris Crum at WebProNews where he talks about rich metadata and how that effects your listing in search results. This will take a little thought and more investigation I think. I don’t know how appropriate it will be for blogs, but for web pages it could be a real plus. I wonder now if there will be developing niche for those that can learn the markup language used. It could be the next best thing in SEO I think.

With comScore reporting a 46% growth in search, it certainly isn’t dying as some have been predicting. I do wonder whether or not the art of SEO itself is starting to feel the pinch. Search results are no longer based purely on ‘relevant pages’. You now have local search results together with a map (for some searches), results appearing based on where the searcher is located geographically, and other results such as images, videos, news and blogs. I know before Christmas I did a search the results page was almost full of featured results. The organic results were limited to about five and were well below the fold.

As an example, type in Barack Obama in a Google search window. The results verify what I have pointed out. In order of appearance in the search results:

1. News items related to Barack Obama
2. BarackObama.com listing
3. Wikipedia
4. real time search results window
5. image results
6. organic results

The organic results start about two-thirds of the way down the page. My suggestion – if you want to appear in search results for Barack Obama, you will probably have more luck using social media and appearing in the real time search results.

Well defined meta descriptions, a good opening paragraph and perhaps the include of rich metadata could mean the difference between winning that click from the searcher or being overlooked for someone who has done it better. I wonder what the search results will look like in two or three years time? Can anyone remember what the search results looked like three years ago?

Fortunately, for now, SEO can still win traffic. Google isn’t the only search engine in town and results like those for Barack Obama are not quite the norm. In the future, who knows, organic results may not start until page two – and who looks there?

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By Les Scammell, August 3, 2009 10:15 am

I have a site that I have carefully built creating content, submitting articles and generally doing all the right things when it comes to SEO. I was quite pleased to see this site finally hit the front page of Google’s search results. It currently sits at number four out of 18 million pages.

That was the easy part. The hard part is actually getting any traffic. There are around 8000 searches each month for that keyword yet I was only receiving about 100 visitors from Google. For a number four listing I thought it a little strange.

Being a busy little beaver I thought no more about it until early last week when I decided to have another look at where it was situated in the search results and what I could do to improve matters. It is still at number four yet the traffic has not improved. When I started looking at the sites in the search results one thing stuck out – their snippets where great and mine was a shocker.

So I went to work. I wrote, rewrote and then wrote again until I had snippet that I though would compete with the competition. Now to get Google to publish it. My first step was to publish it as a title tag in the pages header.

I also rewrote my opening paragraph to paraphrase the title tag. Both the title tag and the opening paragraph used the keyword for that page and really sold the contents of the page.

That was last weekend. It wasn’t until Thursday that I noticed the new snippet in place and from there my traffic has at least tripled. More importantly, my income from that site has least quadrupled.

Just think, it only took one aspect of my SEO to undo all the hard work I had put into it. I have you checked your pages snippet lately?

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By Les Scammell, November 13, 2008 11:15 am

Whether you love them or hate them, Google is the number one search engine and they are not about to change the way they do things because you or I like or dislike the way they do things. Over the last few months Google have opened up a little more on ways to improve your rankings. Their latest Q&A session brought up a few good questions and some rather interesting results. Over the next couple of days I will review their answers and try to deliver back to you in simple English. Continue reading 'Listen To Google To Rank Better – Part One'»