How to Get Your Website Indexed on Google

How do you get your website indexed on Google and actually seen by the people looking for you? What do you really gain if you make it onto the first page of Google? And above all, what does it take for your site to show up first?

This article explains in detail how to get there, and what has changed over the years.

Looking up useful information through search engines such as Google has become a basic part of daily life. Never before have we had access to so much information with a few taps on a keyboard. For many of us, Google is now the starting point for every search: scouting out potential vacation destinations, finding businesses that sell a specific product or service, reading reviews before buying something, and so on.

Google is constantly refining what its search engine can do, and the algorithms are updated frequently. As a result, search results shift from one day to the next. According to MozCast data for the last 12 months, changes were rolled out every 13 days on average.

People often ask me what impact these updates have had on SEO in general, and how they can get onto the first page of Google. I will point to a few major updates throughout this article and cite the resources that go with them. I will also show you how I managed to reach the first page of Google, and what you can do to show up for the search term or phrase you care about.

This is not only about SEO. Google Search is a platform that lets content creators and website owners connect with their target audience, grow their business and generate revenue. The single most important goal of any search engine optimization work is to earn targeted traffic from search engines such as Google and Bing.

There is no shortage of articles on the web about how to pull this off, but there is no one-size-fits-all strategy when it comes to ranking high in the major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo! In this article I will focus on Google, the most popular search engine (roughly 80% of all web searches happen there). I will walk you through what has changed in Google over the years and how it has tuned its algorithms to surface only relevant results. I will also give you a few pointers to start you down the path toward the first page of Google.

Even though major changes have landed in recent years, plenty of people still give very little thought to their online presence and to how they appear on Google (and if they do think about it, they hire an SEO company). People generally go where the traffic is: large websites such as the New York Times or CNN will almost always sit at the top of Google, because they receive so much traffic. If you want to stay on the first page of Google, even if it is only for one specific search term, you need to understand how your site shows up in Google.

I will open this article by going over the factors that influence where a website lands on a results page, then dig into several updates that have had a major impact on how websites rank in Google over the years.

Search engines run on "algorithms". An algorithm is essentially a set of instructions and rules that tell Google (or any other search engine) which results to display when someone runs a keyword search.

The job of an algorithm is to sort through the billions of websites out there and rank them by relevance. The more relevant a website is to the search term, the better it will rank. To get your website ranking well in Google, you have to figure out the algorithms Google uses and play by their rules.

Let me give you two examples of the calculations algorithms rely on: latent semantic indexing

and tf-idf (term frequency-inverse document frequency)

These equations assess the content of a website and how it relates to a user’s specific search query. Many factors can influence the equation a search engine uses to rank websites. We are going to look at those factors from several different angles. I hope it helps you understand why some sites rank better than others in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Search engines do not publish their exact algorithms, so there is no single formula for ranking well in Google. That said, most online marketers agree that websites with quality content stand a far better chance of ranking well in search engines. Websites with thin or poorly written content generally rank lower than other sites. A well-written article can improve your odds of landing on the first page of Google, while a flimsy one will not do much for you.

What does that mean in practice? Say someone searches "New York". A website with genuinely useful information about New York should show up higher on Google than a site called hotelsinnewyorkcityhotelguide.com (a bad example, I know). The information on hotelsinnewyorkcityhotelguide.com is probably about very narrow things, such as how many rooms a hotel has and which amenities it offers. Suppose someone searches "New York". A website with useful information about New York should appear higher on Google than a site called hotelsinnewyorkcityhotelguide.com (a bad example, I know). The information on hotelsinnewyorkcityhotelguide.com most likely covers very specific subjects, such as a hotel’s room count and the services it provides.

Following that logic, you can see why sites such as Wikipedia or About.com rank at the top of the SERPs when people search very broad terms such as "New York" or "cars"

Both of those sites hold a great deal of useful information on those subjects and provide links to other websites (known as internal links) that also offer valuable information. That tells Google those pages are relevant and should therefore rank well in the SERPs when people search specific keywords tied to those subjects.

The number of links pointing to your website is another factor that affects where your site ranks. The more links pointing to you (to your website), the better. But keep this in mind: there is no shortcut here, quality content will almost always beat poor content. If you write good articles with interesting information in them, other webmasters will be far more inclined to link to you than if you simply try to trick or bait them into linking to spam-filled junk.

Now for the more technical side:

This is where the tf-idf equation (term frequency-inverse document frequency) comes in. This equation helps search engines decide whether a keyword should be used to rank the pages of a website. I will try to explain it as clearly and as simply as I can: you can use this equation to work out whether a specific word or phrase carries more weight than other words and phrases, which helps you decide how often it should appear across the pages of your site. That in turn lets you influence where your page lands in the SERPs when someone searches that specific term or phrase.

The following example illustrates the concept nicely: suppose someone searches "New York City hotels"

Leave your website out of the equation and it should rank well

Here is another example: say someone searches "hotels in New York"

Let us see how many relevant pages contain the word "hotels" (hint: almost all of them). You can conclude that this keyword is used very frequently in search engines and that it would be hard to stand out from the competition with that approach. Now let us do some simple math, shall we? If you have a 10,000-word web page and 3% of those words sit inside a specific phrase, 300 keywords out of 10,000 appear on that one page alone. But one word in 1,000 gives you 1,000 terms or phrases, which means that if you have a 10,000-word web page containing a single relevant keyword, you can get that keyword into the first 300 results on Google.

You might think that piling on more keywords will get you a better ranking, but that approach is wrong. If your site offers quality content and has links pointing to it from other websites, especially reputable ones, your search engine rankings will improve over time. But do not be taken in by all the tricks people try to sell you. If someone claims they can put you on the first page of Google with a few tricks or tactics, they are probably lying to you.

I hope I have managed to explain this concept clearly enough for someone who is not very familiar with SEO to follow it. Even when their offer sounds too good to be true, chances are they are not telling the truth. And even if it were true, they would probably never tell you how many links you need to earn for your site to appear on page 1 of Google, or how much quality content you need in order to rank well.

Google is constantly improving its search algorithm

It does this in order to deliver the best possible results to people searching for something online. Every time someone runs a search on Google, Google calculates which pages best fit that specific query and displays those results first, above the usual list of organic results. How popular your ranking is can also change over time

because so many factors feed into SEO, your ranking can shift depending on the time of day, where you are located and plenty of other factors. To get a good sense of the keywords you should be targeting for your website, run a Google search on the phrase or the term you want to use.

In the example above, we need more than 3% within a single web page, but in most cases, with SEO, that is not even enough to reach the first page. You need links from other pages as well, and if someone offers you an easy way to be number one on Google in just three simple steps: run! It cannot be done!

I hope I have been able to explain this concept clearly enough for everyone to follow. If anything in my explanation is unclear, let me know in the comments. Feel free to let me know as well if you have any SEO questions I could answer. Thanks for reading!

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How do you get onto the first page of Google?

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This entry was posted in Internet Marketing , Search Engine Optimization (SEO) , Social Media Optimization (SMO)

About the author: I am Antoine Côté, an entrepreneur, an online marketing specialist, an SEO specialist and a web developer. I hope you find this article useful and that it helps you reach your business goals! You can connect with me through Facebook or Twitter .