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How we Are Reaching Top Google Rankings

As you may know, I´m currently working to push this web site up the Google rankings. As explained in this article, I´d been so busy with client work that I´d neglected my own site and its ranking in the search engines.

This article describes how we began the process of moving our site up the rankings.

Security By Obscurity!

We realised that our site was ranking somewhere between obscurity and extinction in the Google rankings. For our key terms, we were sitting around No 426. We didn´t stand a snowball´s chance in hell of attracting any business through searches. And that, after all, is the whole point of having a great Google ranking!

If we were in the business of hiding from our customers, our obscurity was secured!

My friend, Brendon Sinclair, suggested we carry out an exercise in Search Engine Optimisation on this site, hopefully increase our rankings and, in doing so, create a case study that might help other web designers and site owners.

Beginning To Get Our Site To The Top Of The Search Engines

So, we began work. There were a number of key stages we needed to go through:

• Keyword Assessment - We decided on the terms we thought most relevant to our business and which our customer base might use when searching for our services.
• Assessing Our Site & Competitor Sites - We looked at how our site was performing against our competitors (badly as we´ve already noted!), we looked at how their sites were performing and how they may be achieving their rankings - i.e. what keywords they were using, what content they were providing, what on page factors they were employing and what back-links they had to their site.
• Developing On Page Factors - We needed to look at the content on our site. We needed to assess if our content was useful, interesting and promoting us as a business. We also needed to look at how our content was structured. We looked at the Title tags of our pages - probably the most important element of the page as far as search engines are concerned. We also looked at our headings and sub headings, and the placement of our keywords throughout the content.
• Getting Links To Our Web Site - Incoming links are critical to getting your web site to the top of the search engine rankings. Google will see a link to your site as an endorsement of your site and therefore afford more credibility to it. We started to identify were we could get incoming links. The options included getting links from other web designers, client sites, supplier´s sites and other industry sites and directories.

24 Days Later - We´re at No 11

We´ve been steadily working away at the steps outlined above and the results speak for themselves. In just 19 days the site jumped from No 426 to No 19 !! Thats a whopping 406 steps up the Google ladder! By yesterday ( 12th March) we´d moved up to the No 11 spot!  We may fluctuate a little around there, but the overall trend is still onwards and upwards!

Keeping On Track

We´ll keep on working at this, and I´ll keep you up to date on how we´re going. So do check in again as we continue to the push Inspired eBusiness higher in the Belfast Web Design Search Engine Rankings