How to land on the first page of a Google search

An expert on search engine optimization details how you can boost your site’s prominence

Your company or client should appear on the first page of a Google search.

“If so, you’ll get a majority of the traffic,” said John Spagnuolo, president of the New Media Institute. “If you appear in the second page or third page, good luck—only the people with patience will get to you.”

The interplay between two factors—content and credibility—is both simple and complex. It helps determine where your Web site lands on a Google search.

Content is fairly easy to understand; it’s what’s on your Web site. Credibility is the labyrinth of other sites linking to yours—and the credibility of the sites linking, in turn, to those sites. Part of what induces other sites to link to yours is, of course, the quality of your content.

Spagnuolo recently outlined these terms and their importance at Ragan’s “Communications in a Web 2.0 World” conference. He is a leading expert on search engine optimization (SEO), the tactics a site employs to improving its prominence on search engines such as Google. SEO applies to “organic” (unpaid) searches, not paid advertisements.