How can you get your website to come up on the first page of a google search?
I know about PPC, and adwords they run, but I was under the impression that only effects the side bar and special links on the side.

12/21/2005 10:08:12 AM

i'm pretty sure you have to pay for the phrases you want that will bring up your website. A friend of mine had the same problem and I think he paid a fee per phrase (not expensive) and his site came up first when you typed in like 10 different combination of words

12/21/2005 10:11:10 AM

no no no no no
you don't pay google to help your page move towards the top. Google search results rely on the PageRank of your page, which is calculated by an extremely complex (and secret) algorithm. If you have a unique phrase on your website, and someone happens to search for that unique phrase, then yes, it will come up. But you want to show up at the top of generic searches, and you cannot pay Google to push you to the top except for in an ad.

There's an entire industry called Search Engine Optimization to help people get higher PageRanks. But there is no silver bullet. The important things are to make sure your sites are well organized and compliant with webstandards so their bots can crawl them efficiently, and probably the biggest boost is to get links to your site from other "important" sites. e.g. If CNN or BCC.com ran a front page story that linked directly to your site, that would be a huge boost to your PageRank. ALso, if an ncsu.edu page links to your site, that's a plus, but not as much of harvard.edu or stanford.edu linked to your site, because those sites are considered "more important" than ncsu.edu.

Google "SEO" or "Search Engine Optimization" and you will find thousands of people who claim to help. Many of them are scammers - they will put your site into big "link farms" that will temporarily boost your PageRank, but when Google eventually finds and blocks the link farm (which they will), your PageRank will plummet. Here's a short article about good and bad SEOs - http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10415455/site/newsweek/

Also, read every post on this blog - http://mattcutts.com/blog/
Matt Cutts a google employee and a SEO expert, so he gives good insight and tips

12/21/2005 10:40:05 AM

what he said

i did some seo to my page and now I get alot more hits from search engines

12/21/2005 11:48:00 AM

Thanks guys....
Thats just what I was looking for.

12/21/2005 1:56:19 PM