I was talking to a client the other day about websites. He typed “wedding photographer” in Google, clicked the mouse, and turned to me.

“I want to be at the top of the first page in Google,” he said. “How do I get there?”

Most of us assume that the top spot on Google is the best position for your website, and that everything else is second-best. The reality is that the top spot is rarely the right place for your business: it will cost too much to get there, and like the game “king of the hill” you won’t stay on top for long.

Instead of focusing on the #1 spot, if you can be in the “top 10″ for your selected keywords, you’ll get just as many customers off the Internet, and you’ll save lots of money too.

For example: if I type “wedding photographer” in Google, there are 16 million pages returned. To get to the top of this list, the 3 studios in the yellow box have agreed to pay Google approximately $2 dollars every time a person ‘clicks on’ their ad in exchange for the top position. This means that each of these 3 studios are paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month to be on the top of the page.

However, the spots immediately underneath the top 3 are different…their owners got there for free. Websites 4-10 have moved to the top of the list by

Great content: People browse websites that contain useful information. Articles like “How to Dress for a Portrait Session” or “How Much Should You Spend on Wedding Photography?” make online customers trust your website. The more great content you have that is easy to find, the longer folks will stay on your site, and the higher you’ll rise in Google.

Keywords: When Google sees a keyword like “wedding photographer” in your text, in the names of your images, and in the links on each page, it assumes your site is really about wedding photographers. If you live in Michigan, you should include “michigan wedding photographer” and “mi wedding photographer” too.

High-quality links: This is the most powerful secret of all, and the hardest to accomplish. If you provide great content with descriptive keywords to help people find it, over time they will link to your website. The more links you get, the higher you’ll rise in Google. Be careful though. Simply swapping links with thousands of other websites, or participating in “link farms” that are just pages of links, will do nothing for your Google page rank.

Focus on these three areas on your website, and you can move to the “top 10″ in Google for a whole lot less money than the “top 3″ pay.

Tags: online, SEO

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