Every owner wants to be at the top of every relevant search to their website. This is simply because nearly 80% of users, who search using Google, open the websites they see on first page of the results, and rarely venture into succeeding pages. So being on page 1 means that your website is on its way to attracting audience numbers.

This blog is a guide to help assist you to rise in Google rankings. Google is the search engine we will feature as it owns more than 90% of the Australian search engine market.

Website owners must keep in mind that the Google search results page includes organic search results and often paid advertisements (aka Sponsored Links) as well. Advertising with Google won't have any effect on your website's presence in the search results. Google never accepts money to include or rank websites in their search results, and it costs nothing to appear in their organic search results. Free resources such as Webmaster Tools, the official Webmaster Central blog, and the discussion forum can provide you with a great deal of information about how to optimise your website for organic search.

For your better understanding, it is important to know that Google delivers search results after undertaking three processes, namely crawling, indexing and serving. Crawling simply answers ‘does Google know your website'? Indexing is just about adding your website to Google's index. And Serving is concerned in websites having good and useful content that is relevant to the user's search.

Now that you know the process, following the below guidelines (taken from http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 and expanded on) will help Google find, index, and rank your website:

1. 1. When your website is ready, submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
      
      
   2. Submit a Sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools. The sitemap you submitted will be use by Google to learn about your structure and increase coverage of your webpages.
      
      
   3. Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online. And make sure that other websites link to yours, the many links that you'll have will increase your ranking.
      
      
   4. Provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. Make a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
      
      
   5. Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
      
      
   6. Give visitors the information they're looking for by creating a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
      
      
   7. Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
      
      
   8. Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the "ALT" attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
      
      
   9. Make sure that your elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
      
      
   10. Check for broken links and correct HTML.
       
       
   11. If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
       
       
   12. Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
       
       
   13. Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site
       
       
   14. Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site.
       
       
   15. Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header.
       
       
   16. Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server.
       
       
   17. If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system creates pages and links that search engines can crawl.
       
       
   18. Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.
       
       
   19. Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.
       
       
   20. Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
       
       
   21. Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.
       
       
   22. Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank.
       
       
   23. Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc.
       
       
   24. Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
       
       
   25. Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
       
       
   26. Don't send automated queries to Google.
       
       
   27. Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
       
       
   28. Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
       
       
   29. Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.
       
       
   30. Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engine or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
       
       
   31. If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value.
       
       
   32. Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links and only natural links are useful for the indexing and ranking of your site.

Much of the above requires technical knowledge, and this is why SEO professionals like us make a living!

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) service providers are specialists in doing all of the above. A great time to hire is when you're considering a website re-design, or planning to launch a new website. That way, you and your search engine optimiser can ensure that your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up.

But you must take great caution when acquiring SEO services as there are unethical players in the market, who have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to manipulate search engine results in unfair ways. Practices that violate Google's guidelines may result in a negative adjustment of your website's presence in Google, or even the removal of your site from their index.

Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit. So just keep these in mind and be guided.

We at KayWeb (Sydney and Melbourne) are ethical SEO professionals.