For the last three months I have been hard at work learning SEO by optimizing a local small business website. The business is called Giggly Wiggly Preschool and is located in the Seattle suburb Issaquah, Washington.

5 Tips to getting on the first Page

There are hundreds of factors that Google use to determine the position of their result but you only really have to get the big factors right to start seeing some benefits. From over 5 years of experience with battling with googles wits these are my top tips for getting your site to number 1. Before you start you need to find our your Google Page rank. You can find your page rank by downloading the google toolbar and enabling the page rank option. <center></center> If you're not allowed to install toolbars then there are lots of websites around that will tell you your sites page rank. It will be an integer value between 0 and 10.

1. Invest some time and cash on inbound links

Its important to get your site's page rank as high as possible. Only a handful of sites have a page rank (PR) of 10, e.g. google.com, nasa.com, adobe.com. Then following a log distribution more sites have a PR9 and even more PR8 etc. Anything above PR4 is more than sufficient to get your site to number 1. If you're website is new then it will take anything up to 3 months to get your page rank off zero. To pump your rank get lots of inbound links to your site, preferably from sites with big page ranks themselves. The more outbound links they have, the less of an effect it will have on you so don't be tricked into link farms as these provide a very low quality of link. Also be aware of the tag REL="NO-FOLLOW" tag can be placed with the link and it negates any page rank effect that may be passed on to your site. It is becoming very common now as it allows sites to retain their page rank and promote sites of their choosing.

2. Don't think about cheating

If you think you are cleverer than Google then forget it! Trying special tricks and cheats to trick google will only ruin you in the long run. Google analysis each site and check it for completeness and quality. You will be rewarded for meeting web standards such as W3C and for displaying content which reads well and doesn't contain any spelling errors. If you try keyword ramming they may penalise you by pushing you down a few pages.

3. Avoid Dynamic URL's

If your site is dynamic then great, you'll get some benefit from displaying up to date content but beware that Google isn't too keen with dynamic urls e.g.

http://yoursite.com/products.php?id=34984

URL's like these have the ability to spawn an infinite number of pages so Google will only spider a few of them, and gingerly at that. You are much better using MOD_REWRITE to rewrite your URL's to:

http://yoursite.com/products/34984

This way all of your products will be treated as a different page and spidered independently.

4. Use Google Sitemaps or Google Base

You should try and submit your site's details to Google automatically when any changes are made to your site. This blog has a sitemap which can be found at: http://wildetech.railed.co.uk/sitemap.xml. Using Google's webmaster toolkit you can register XML feeds with them so they are kept up to date with any changes of your site.

5. Optimise your Keywords

Firstly you need to know which keywords you want your site to respond to. You could just guess but you can use Google Suggest to provide you with the most fruitful terms. Google Suggest: http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en If you are selling flowers in London then start by typing London Flower <center></center> The numbers next to each of the suggestions refer to the number of times that term has been searched. This is very misleading as it seems that the number refers to the number of returned results in the search. You can see that isn't not because when you search the number of results is vastly different, usually twice as large. So use the list of suggested search terms to optimise your site to respond to the most frequently searched words.

If you want us to do this and more then check out our search engine optimisation service.