What We Have Done | 
Audrey: Today’s burning question is: How do I get my website onto the first page on Google? This is such a good question.
Jeanette: Yes, that’s something a lot of people want to know, as well, right? There’s this joke that I always tell: Where’s the best place to hide a dead body? On the second page of Google.
Audrey: Oh my goodness.
Jeanette: Yeah, anyway, it’s definitely a burning question. I think you have some stuff to say about it, right?
Audrey: Yeah, it’s such a technical question, I think in this session here we will not be able to get into a lot of depth, but I think what we have are some quick wins that you could actually almost immediately try on your website or whatnot. So, here is my first idea, alright? The first one would be putting yourself on Waze, Google Maps, the Google business pages. Those things are important; those things are the must-haves if you have a business. When you put yourself out there, when people start Googling things, for example, coding school, Next Academy actually appears there. Not just our business profile, but there is also this map snippet there. Next Academy will update that with our school name and our description as well. So make sure that your description is also well-optimized.
Jeanette: And it’s something that’s so easy to do, you can do it right away. Like, why not do it, right?
Audrey: And a lot of people don’t do it. Maybe it never occurred to them or they just don’t remember but it’s one of the easiest things that you could immediately jump on for the next half an hour and just fix things and set it up for yourself. OK, next up.
Jeanette: The other thing would probably be onsite optimization so you need to think about how your website looks to the user because, to rank on Google, there are a lot of factors that go into the algorithm and ultimately how the machine decides who gets to be ranked higher. So, one of the things you need to do with your website is make sure that it looks good to humans as well as meeting the machine requirements. Does it have all the necessary HTML tags? Can the crawler reach the HTML on your site? Can they actually pick up the important points within the site? And then there are other things like site speed, so if your page takes too long to load and the user bounces, that signifies that it doesn’t provide value to them and it can, sort of, reduce your records as well. So, on-page optimization is very important as well and it’s something that you can do straightaway when you’re building a website.
Audrey: Yeah, and I noticed that one really big thing would be backlinks, right? What are some of your thoughts on that?
Jeanette: Yeah, so backlinks also signify that the content that you have on the site is valuable and that’s why people are linking to it. There are some really hack-y ways of building backlinks and I don’t recommend those because, ultimately, they will hurt you in the long run, especially if you’re getting stuff, getting backlinks from really spammy websites.
Audrey: Yes.
Jeanette: So, building backlinks is one good way to build content but when you build these backlinks, you want to look for websites that are relevant, right?
Audrey: Yeah.
Jeanette: So they themselves are sort of like an authority within that niche and you want them to be using you as a reference. So to do that, of course you need to create content as well.
Audrey: Yep.
Jeanette: Your content has to be something that is really informative and valuable. I know someone who actually got a backlink from Wikipedia.
Audrey: Oh, wow!
Jeanette: Yeah, because they produced a long piece of content that was really informative, so when someone’s editing the Wikipedia reference page, they use that block processor source. So, that’s how they got a backlink from Wikipedia and it really contributed to their ranking as well.
Audrey: Yeah, and Wikipedia is a really credible site, as well, right, so that helps a lot.
Jeanette: Mmhmm.
Audrey: Yeah, OK, do you have anything else to add?
Jeanette: What I would say is that SEO is really something that is very technical and I think that you need to do a lot of your own reading.
Audrey: Yeah, a lot, a lot! But definitely a very good question to ask and a lot of homework to do for this. We have just mentioned some of the quick wins that you could immediately work on, so you should start working on them. All right, so if you have any more burning questions like this, feel free to ask us on the next digital marketing lab. See you next time!
