When a newbie starts on his website or blog , the first thing they want to know is how to bring their site in  first page of google ? What are the steps to achieve this ?

Some developers and webmasters have the notion is that Google is against SEO. It considers SEO to be an illegal activity. Well that is not the case.  Google is against the black hat SEO not white hat SEO.  The proof lies in the pudding so here is the official SEO Guide for starters from Google.

This guide outlines the simple basic steps for developers which will help in better indexing of their site which in turn leads to a better probability of coming up in google search pages.

Either you should be born smart. Else you should stay with people smarter than yourself so that you can learn from them.

I am not born super smart so I try to learn from smart people. And I try to stay in their company by reading their blogs (this is a smart way !!)

One such person in field of search engine optimization is Avinash Kaushik. I had been using google analytics for 6 months but was never aware of some very powerful features . In his recent post , Six Tips For Improving High Bounce / Low Conversion Web Pages , Avinash explained how could use google analytics to identify the visitors of landing pages.

Go to your analytics account. Clock on Contents on left side. You will see the pages which users had visited.

Select a page and then select Content detail from the browser as below. Here you can see entrance keywords and entrance sources for this page

Once you drill into details , you can find the keywords and sources for your site. With the keywords you can guess if the user has landed on the right page. If not , then you have an idea as to why your bounce rate has been high. The page should have the contents for which the users has been searching and it should be very well written in first paragraph or the heading.

Therefore do not stuff your pages with unnecessary keywords else it is going to piss of your users.

This feature will also help you to drill into details of your campaign , if the campaign has been generating user response , people are staying on your site or not.

Many years ago John Chow started getting steam as a blogger and told Google to goto hell. John sold paid links, paid reviews, and did massive amounts of reciprocal link exchanges to gain tons of back links. All of which fall under the penalty of death under google’s kingdom

John was given the death penalty and completely removed from the Google Index. Many people wrote about this and how Google was owning John and he was done for.

But with banned by google , a strange thing happened. His popularity and brand grew. Now it was the success story of how you really don’t really need Google to succeed on the internet.

Search traffic for john chow was growing but nobody could find him on Google. What people were finding was infringing sites like johncow or notjohnchow who were only getting traffic because they were ranking for John’s name.

Always being creative and realizing that Google penalizes the domain, but not the link, John registered Johnchow.ca and redirected GoogleBot to that domain. Within days Johnchow.ca started ranking for all the phrases that johnchow.com used to. But google did not liked it and within couple days Johnchow.ca was penalized as bad as JohnChow.com.

But looks like JohnChow is back in google search and that too at a very good rank !!

Thanks to ShoeMoney for this post