We get asked this question a lot - "How do I get my site on the front page of Google?"

The short answer is "You pay for it. Either in time or money".

But that's probably not very helpful for most people who want an answer to the question so here is the longer answer.

This is not a guide for DIYers - there are already a lot of great resources out there.

This is for the kind of people that ask us the question - i.e. business owners who just want a general picture of what's involved.

When asked this question, we often ask back "For what search terms?". This is something that people either fail to grasp or forget, yet it is a vital piece of the puzzle.

You can't be on the front page of Google for everything.

But you can be on the front page when people search using words that relate to your business or enterprise.

Organic vs Paid search listings

Firstly, there is more than one part to the Google 'front page' – organic results and paid (or sponsored) links.

To get at the top of each requires different strategies.

There are also location based 'Places' (listed with a map) that will come up when a searcher include location search terms such as a City or suburb.

Paid listings – Google Adwords

Sponsored links or paid search listings (sometimes referred to as PPC) are paid for through Google Adwords.

Adwords are short ads that are displayed when people search for the keyword phrases you specify in your Adwords campaign. You only pay when people click on your ad and visit your website - hence the name PPC which stands for Pay Per Click.

There's a lot of material around about Adwords and the equivalent schemes in Yahoo, Bing and Facebook which we're not going to cover in this article (the subject for another post perhaps!)

The things that seem to surprise most people new to Adwords:

• Yes, it really is going to cost you $1, $3 and upward a click – not 10 cents.
• If you want your ad to be at the top everytime, it may end up costing you a significant amount of money so start with a budget in mind
• No there is nothing to stop malicious competitors clicking on your ad.
• No, you can't guarantee every visitor will buy something – set your expectations quite low to begin with
• Sending those visitors to your homepage is not the best strategy – you'll need a landing page to make the most of your ad spend

For beginners who want to DIY, there's no better place to start than Google themselves with their Learning Centre.

Many businesses are happy to pay someone else to manage their Adwords campaign. Contact Us if you want to find out more about how that would work for your business.

Organic Listings – SEO gets your site at the top of the search results.

Usually when people mention SEO they mean Search Engine Optimisation. This means getting your site on the organic search results – on the first page preferrably.

While in theory it isn't difficult (complex but not rocket science), in practise it can be a lot harder than people think.

It is possible to get a site, one focused on a single, long tail keyword phrase with little competition, on the front page quickly.

But this is probably not going to be for anything people search for in large numbers.

And will be precious little help for a business that want results for their existing website. This website will be focused on and limited to the reality of what their business offers.

For the do-it-yourselfer's out there, those helpful people at Google have provided a Google SEO guide

Our SEO Framework

Our SEO Framework has these key steps which will give you an idea of what you will need to do or have done for you, to get on the front page of Google.

1. Establish a keyword list and priorities.

   Do some research and find out what words people are using when they search for your services. Tools like Google's keyword research tool will give you some idea of how many searches there are. Don't use the figures as absolutes as the accuracy is under question, but you can at least compare different phrases.

   Check how much competition there is. You can get an indication from Google but you also do it easily by entering "your search term" (inside quotes) into Google and see how many results come up. If there are hundreds of thousands or even millions of pages, you know there is a lot of competition for that phrase.

   There are further decisions you need to make about best fit, how many keywords you will target etc which depends on your resources, your business etc.

2. On page (site) optimisation

   This is about your website and fits into two parts – the stuff that's not obvious and the stuff that is.

   The stuff that is not obvious to the average visitor include having standards compliant code, good site architecture, internal linking, appropriate title tags, image alt tags etc. All of these take into account your target keyword phrases.

   And Google is paying more attention to site speed these days and this will be influenced by how well your site is constructed.

   The obvious stuff is your website content – relevant content that includes your keywords in the title, headings, body etc. But it should not be 'stuffed' with keywords.

   It is common for us (and other SEO professionals) to recommend a complete redesign if a site is doing poorly in the search engines.

   If it wasn't designed with SEO in mind right from the beginning, it can be very hard to get good results as retro-fitting a badly optimised website will often be more effort than starting with a complete new design.

3. Off site optimisation

   This pretty much means link building. Getting as many links back to your site as possible. From sites whose content relates in some way to yours. Links from premium sites are preferrable.

   Social media links and shares - content that is relevant, useful and engaging enough to be shared is like gold. Article marketing, directory submissions etc all come under this heading.

   Video (uploaded to YouTube or others) is a popular and effective way of getting traffic back to your site.

4. Measure, rinse and repeat

   See what is working and what is not.

   Tweak.

   Monitor.

5. How to get on the front page of Google if your site is new

   New sites will struggle at first with SEO because of some of the things that Google take into account in their algorithm which works out where in the list you will be, such as domain age (how old your site is). Supposedly they don't like it if you acquire back links too fast – but this has been debated and besides, what is 'too fast' ?.

   There is the (unconfirmed) 'sandbox effect' which effectively means you won't get anywhere until Google is satisfied you're not a fly by night spammer. It doesn't always happen but generally we see new sites struggle to get any visibility for the first few months. Longer if they wait before embarking on an SEO strategy described above.

   We recommend an Adwords campaign for the first 3-6 months until your SEO activities start showing some results.

But wait there's more!

Not a set of knives, sorry. If you do want to embark on a journey of DIY SEO, you also need to think about SEO for local search, and how to SEO your Social Media Marketing.

As you can see there is a lot involved if you want to be on the front page of Google.

Finally, yes we do SEO - find out about our SEO Services