How To Get First Page Rankings With SEO - Learn The Secret To SEO
- Crissabelle Freeman
- Dec 8, 2023
- 11 min read
Updated: Jan 17, 2024
Quick Start
Learn SEO with the secret. 95% of businesses aren’t doing SEO right - and the other 5% know the secret to Get First Page Rankings with SEO. This guide is intended to give a high-level overview of what Search Engine Optimization really is. It will also teach you the secret of how to practically apply SEO to your business so that you can get first page rankings.
Most SEO strategies are done with regards to the logic of the Google search engine, but there are a plethora of search engines used in all different parts of the world that exist. Most search engines and directories, however, use the same common logic to rank and display search results. The motive of a search engine is to get the user to the end-goal of their search as quickly and seamlessly as possible.
Therefore, understanding the way that Google ranks web pages will suffice as a starting point into the world of SEO.
Search Engine Optimization is not just about ranking higher or gaining more visibility online. It’s a practice that involves collecting, creating, and optimizing high quality data. That’s the secret.
Data is everything online, and there is a growing problem with unreliable, low quality data and having too much of it for search engines to keep up with. Before creating content online to rank in search engines, creators and businesses alike should understand that data is not just the content you create, but it’s also the code and algorithms used to organize and display that content. Having some comprehension of the way that code and algorithms work will give you an edge in this field.
In the next section, we’ll discuss the first concept to understand in SEO. You must understand Domain Authority in order to fully understand SEO. It gives you the starting point and ending point to all SEO strategies.
Domain Authority
Moz coined the term, 'Domain authority', which is a score from 0 to 100 of a website’s overall presence, or authority, within search engines. This presence can vary from engine to engine, and it’s a score that’s compiled from various factors, such as the quality of a website and content, the number of links a website has, testimonials/reviews, the age of the website, and much more. A search engine like Google will use bots, or crawlers, that are programs designed to assess the authority of any website.
There are several tools that you can use to assess your Domain Authority, and we’ll talk about them throughout this guide.
How is Domain Authority calculated? According to FirstPageSage, these are the top Google ranking factors and how they are weighted (actual weights up for interpretation):
Consistent publication of high-quality content (26%)
Keywords in meta title (17%)
Backlinks (15%)
Niche expertise (13%)
User engagement (11%)
Internal links (5%)
Mobile-friendly/mobile-first (5%)
Page speed (2%)
Site security/SSL certificate (2%)
Schema markup/structured data (1%)
Keywords in URL (1%)
Keywords in H1 (1%)
Optimizing your website and media with regards to the above weighted elements will help to increase your Domain Authority score and overall Page Rankings.
Additionally, Google has at least 10000 human quality raters who rate websites, and they use a quality assurance guide, made available online, that they base their ratings on. It’s important to note that ratings from these raters don’t necessarily affect your website rank.
This is stated in their guide, in that:
Ratings are used to measure how effectively search engines are working to deliver helpful content. Ratings also improve search engines by providing examples of helpful and unhelpful results for different searches.
Basically, a handful of raters can affect your score, but no single rater can.
The primary platform used for Google SEO is Google Search console. It is a free platform offered by Google to assess your website and business SEO quality. Head to the Google Search Console website and follow the process to integrate it with your website if you haven't already. Everyone who operates as a business within Google’s search engine should have it integrated with their website.
In addition to understanding the weights that affect Domain Authority and Page Rankings, it’s imperative that you perform consistent site audits of your website and SEO strategies to address and fix technical issues that could prevent your content from ranking.
To assist with your audits and technical updates, you can utilize the Core Web Vitals tool within Google Search Console. It provides reports and insight into how well your pages perform. Some of the most common technical issues you’ll find are listed below:
Crawling errors or broken links
Duplicate content
Thin Content
Page load speed
Mobile usability
This leads us to our next item – On-Site SEO.
Learn SEO: On-Site SEO
On-Site SEO is the process of optimizing your website content and allowing it to be more accessible to search engines and users. This process includes several activities, from updating the content of your pages to modifying the metadata of those pages to applying naming conventions to classes in HTML/CSS/JS.
Arguably the most important part of On-Site SEO is making sure your metadata is relevant and appealing to users on the web. So, we’ll start there.
What Is Metadata?
Metadata is data about data. There are several meta-fields that can be found on any web page, but the SEO title, SEO description, and SEO keywords metadata are needed in every search engine. There are a variety of ways to apply this type of data to your web pages, and the uses for those 3 fields are to tell search engines what that page is about and provide the display for your page’s search listing results, as seen in the image below.
SEO Title
SEO Description
SEO Keywords: You can find the SEO Keyword in the SEO Title and SEO Description
To get the best quality from your metadata, try to include these 14 Copywriting improvements in your metadata:
Benefits (not features)
Use the word “you”
Name-dropping/authority
Numbers
Percentages
Time (Now/Today)
Emotion-Evoking Words And Topics (Love/hate)
Hot Topics
Ease of use
Promise of Success
For The Audience, Not You
New/Different
Uniqueness
Include keywords in meta title and meta description of web pages.
If you want to learn more about how different types of metadata and microdata work. View our guides on implementing SEO Strategies for different types of businesses.
There are several ways to implement the many different On-Site SEO practices depending on the type of website builder you are using. Our extended On-Site SEO guide discusses more about the different types of On-Site SEO, which should all be practiced regardless of the website.
The Secret To Get First Page Rankings: Collecting, Creating, And Optimizing High-Quality Data
SEO is a field of data science, and it’s not just about content generation or ranking for keywords. It is just as much, if not more, about the optimization of content and keywords that already exist within Big Data.
Instead of adding to the quintillions of bytes of data already present in online directories, find a way to take some of that related data that’s scattered in all different places of the internet, bring it closer together, condense it, and present the new format in a convenient, easily executed fashion.
This section discusses how the process of SEO is amplified through a field known as content marketing. Content marketing involves the creation and sharing of online content that is intended to engage and entice audiences. It is through this field that the secret to SEO is revealed. Shared in this guide is a sure-fire way to drastically increase rankings in minimal time.
An example of practically applying the secret through content marketing is by creating and consistently posting high-quality and engaging blog posts, social posts, videos, etc. We’ve found that this is the most effective and powerful way to get first page rankings in search engines.
Before posting anything, remember these 3 rules:
Do the research.
Post only what you know about.
Go for sustainable, not viral.
The next section should act as the starting point for every new piece of content you create.
What’s necessary to meet the criteria of a high-quality piece of content?
When creating content to rank in search engines, you should create with regards to how search works and Google’s Ranking Systems, which include the 5 key factors they use to rank any web page. Those 5 key factors are:
Meaning: Search engines like Google have an intent-based approach for search queries, which seeks to find the true meanings of searches. They build language models to determine that “create ai content” could mean the same thing as “generate ai content”.
Relevance: Does a web page have relevant keywords to your search for “cats”? Not just that, several other factors help create signals for search engines that could be relevant to any query, such as images, videos, lists of cat breeds, and more.
Quality: Ranking systems will also seek to identify and prioritize content that is most helpful. Posts that include original and unique content that has expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. For example, if another prominent website links to your content, it’s most likely that the information on your web page can be trusted.
Usability: Google favors web pages that are accessible and easy to navigate. Pages are analyzed with regards to page experience aspects that outline core vitals like page load time a mobile-friendly websites.
Context: Information like location, past search history, search settings, cached data, and more are also considered when displaying search results to users.
Businesses should post with regards to the weighted elements found in the Domain Authority section of this guide. Given the first bullet about posting consistently, businesses should try to post at least 3 to 4 times a month.
User Experience: Improve The Quality Of Your Writing
How does your writing make users feel? Not every business has the resources for a quality assurance team, but collecting user feedback and implementing quality control procedures to improve the user experience is key in SEO. Keep these tips in mind when evaluating and ensuring the quality of your content:
Create a path for the reader using headers that contain your keywords.
Perform extensive keyword research and include the keywords throughout your content.
Add bullets or number indentations where possible.
Use h1, h2, h3, etc. sparingly but concisely throughout text to control the flow of your content.
You should have bolded text on your page to highlight important/relevant words or phrases and italicized text to express some kind of emphasis on a topic or word.
This specialized inline text will help to describe the topic being expressed to Google crawlers and users more efficiently. A majority of people skim, and this will help to highlight key points quick and easily for users.
Cite valuable resources and references that are related to your content.
Include internal and external links.
Categorize your content.
Make sure that you have your content suited under the most relevant category or categories if your post contains multiple subjects.
Develop post architecture. What will the main components of the post be? Create a template that is modular and replicable.
Depending on the type of blog post, the structure of your posts can vary, but if you are developing blog posts in the same category or sub-category, you would want those similar posts to as well be similar in post layout. This strategy helps maintain a theme across your website, and it makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index your pages.
Having a table of contents and anchor text are very valuable in posts. They provide crawlers with clarity as to the composition of the web page and make it easy for users to navigate quickly throughout your posts and web pages.
Create a video in relation to your post. Not only is this a valuable resource, but most people online would also prefer to watch a video or listen to a sound bit than read through the actual post or page nowadays.
Try to compact the content of your post in the video and highlight key parts of the article. You don’t need to read the post verbatim to impact users so long as you’re providing answers to their questions and high-quality dialogue.
Also, put yourself in the shoes of the user, who will base their experience of your content off questions like:
Would you like to read it? Is your site a niche topic or topic clusters?
Is it interesting? Written by an expert? Unique and original ideas?
Is it written in big font and with lots of whitespace between lines?
Does it use subheadings for easy skimming?
Does it have a strong opening to capture attention?
Redundancy: Not a popular opinion, but it’s good to practice the art of redundancy and repeat things on your website and posts, so long as you’re not spamming it everywhere. For example, slogans, catch phrases, or philosophies are probably most appropriate when repeated in any area of a website.
Blog post examples with modular templates
Figure 1.1: A case-study template
Post Type - Minimalist Case Study Outline:
Introduce Problem
Identity and summarize how the problem started. Discuss key details leading up to what happened.
Discuss The Solution
Provide step-by-step process where possible
Provide instructions/outline the solution process
Provide A Summary Of The Case
Add some sub headings explaining the context of your summary
Add A Success Story And Company Overview
Post Type - Minimalist Product/Service Overview:
Product introduction
Describe product usage, applications, or service
Include real-life scenarios/testimonials
Define product or service composition
Add filler details explaining the product’s/service history
Conclude by talking up the product
Post Type - Minimalist Guide:
Introduce subject
Discuss any number of topics
Be descriptive but brief
Make the topics the headings within your post
Provide examples where possible
Summarize topics
Provide additional resources vs. your topics
Conclude by summarizing your guide
Rule Of Thumb For Posts: How Many Of Each Element Should Be Included In A Post?
These rules apply generally to any post. The elements in the table should show up in your content a minimum number of times based on your word count. Try to balance this by not exceeding the second number in each column. You can include more elements than shown, but including too many of one specific element could be considered spammy by search engines depending on the word count.
It takes a bit of experience and experimentation to get it just right. Keeping these numbers in mind should help you to better structure your content in future posts as well as make brainstorming easier. Additionally, you can synergize the effectiveness of any one element by combining it with another. For example, you can bold a keyword or make it an external link.
| 0 - 1000 Word Count | 1000+ Word Count |
Headers | 2 – 3+ | 3 – 5+ |
Internal Links | 2 – 3+ | 3 - 5+ |
External Links | 2 – 3+ | 3+ |
Bold Text | 2- 3+ | 5+ |
Quotes/Italicized Text | 1 – 2+ | 2 – 3+ |
Images/Tables | 1 – 3+ | 2 – 3+ |
Videos | 0 – 1+ | 0 – 1+ |
Figure 1.2: Rule Of Thumb Table
Improve the consistency and precision of your writing by using a text optimization tool or a keyword density checker tool.
In the case of keywords, It's safe to say that you should have one to two focus keywords per page, and generally, you want the keyword density of that page to be less than 5%.
Revive old posts by posting them onto social media or updating the content to be more contemporary. Use a post scheduler to share posts continuously on schedule.
To learn more about how to create helpful, reliable, people-first content, you can view the Google documentation online.
AI And SEO
A.I. can be used in a lot of different ways for SEO and Digital Marketing in general. However, one of the more popular uses cases for AI nowadays is content generation. You can create AI generated content and post it to be indexed and ranked in search engines, but there is a catch.
The content you post should be proof-read for errors and consistency, and you should always go the extra mile to markup the content with On-Site SEO like images, links, and resources. It’s completely fine to generate the content, but to consider it high quality data, Google is looking for more than just text.
For Google’s views on AI-generated content and how pages with AI content are ranked, you can view their article titled, ‘Google Search’s guidance about AI-generated content’. As always, the point of SEO is to offer high-quality data, or content, to your users. Big blocks of texts are not only unappealing, but most people would rather not read something that sounds like a robot wrote it.
The most used AI for content generation is ChatGPT. View how we used ChatGPT to create Digital Marketing guides using AI.
Promote Your Content
So, you have content, and it’s high-quality. That’s not the end. What you should do now is promote your content through multiple platforms.
Post consistently to social media, course platforms, community forums, and more. When you create any piece of content, spread it across the web through the various networks and communities we use for sharing. One powerful networking tactic is to create press releases and syndicate them on other high rankings websites and platforms.
Stay as relevant as possible in each online space and only post where your content is valued. Thus, you have contributed to the solution, rather than the growing problem of having too much unreliable data online nowadays.
Overall, trust the process. If you feel confident that your material is worth being found, you can be confident that search engines and users will find it.
Conclusion
Does this sound like a lot of work to you? It kind of is, but it's worth it! Get first page rankings quickly by hiring Get First Page as your SEO Managers. Request a consultation to get the process started.
To recap:
Do the research.
Create high-quality content.
Post consistently.
Stay tuned! Check back in on this post often! We plan to update the content found here consistently with juicy resources and examples in the near future.
Thus, concludes our guide on the secret to SEO.
Thanks for following us here at Get First Page.
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