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Want to rank first page on google? Who doesn’t!

Just imagine- hundreds of people visiting your blog every day. Just because they searched something and your blog is the first result.

When I found out one of my blog posts was first on Google, I was thrilled.

My blog is relatively new, and I hadn’t been using a solid SEO strategy (Pinterest is more my thing). So I was very surprised to see my blog post come up first!

This post will show you exactly how I wrote that blog post and a list of tips to follow. So you can learn how to rank first page on Google and get tonnes of blog traffic daily- for free!

(If you’re yet to start a blog, be sure to check out my how to start a blog guide. It’s over 4,000 words long, and shows you exactly how to get your own blog up and running in less than an hour!)

First, let’s look at the post that ranked first on Google.

MY POST THAT COMES UP FIRST ON GOOGLE

If you search “How to make your Pinterest look professional” on Google, my blog post comes up. (Apart from 1 advert). You can see this below:

If you look at the number of search results, there are quite a few.

I’ve managed to rank first page on Google when someone searches this term. Without much effort and for free!

So how did I write this post?

HOW TO RANK FIRST PAGE ON GOOGLE

Before we go any further, there is one thing you need. The one plugin I downloaded since starting my blog and really helped with my SEO:

1. DOWNLOAD THE FREE YOAST SEO PLUGIN

This is a free plugin that is the plugin which will help you rank first page on Google. Once you’ve installed and activated it, an extra section will be added in the right hand side of the publishing box. It rates the readability and SEO of each of your blog posts, so as long as your post has a little green tick by it, it’s SEO optimised!

You can see for that post, my readability wasn’t amazing which is why it’s amber not green. But do not worry! The plugin also makes suggestions that’ll help make sure you get two green ticks.

This will appear at the bottom of your WordPress post as you edit it. There is an SEO tab and a readability tab. So as long as everything is green, your post will be SEO optimised (and easy to read).

I just made sure I improved the SEO of my post following the suggestions!

2. BASE YOUR POST ON A LONG TAIL KEYWORD/ PHRASE

With the Yoast plugin, you enter a keyword for the SEO score of your post to be calculated.

When I first started I was using just one short keyword. So, if my post was about branding your blog, I’d just use the word “branding” as my keyword.

This is useless.

I say this for 2 reasons:

There will be loaaads of other results for just one word.

My post that ranks first uses the keywords “Pinterest look professional”, in that order. Here’s what happens when we just search for the term “Pinterest”:

That’s waaay more results than when you search for the actual question “How to make your pinterest look professional”. There’s no chance my post is ranking first for when people just search for Pinterest.

Your content won’t be as relevant.

My blog post used the keyword phrase “Pinterest look professional” 8 times out of 1651 words. However it used the word Pinterest 30 times.

Even though I would have a higher keyword density if I just used the short keyword “Pinterest”, my post won’t be as relevant. Because let’s be honest, if someone is just searching for Pinterest, they probably want to visit Pinterest.

Google is clever, and even though my blog post probably mentions the word Pinterest more times than the actual Pinterest website does, it won’t rank my blog post above actual Pinterest. Keep this in mind when selecting a keyword for your post.

3. USE THIS KEYWORD EVERYWHERE!

That’s a joke. But you do need to use the keyword/ phrase in the following places:

- Your blog post title

- At the beginning of your post

- In at least one header using H1 or H2 text

- Throughout your post

In your meta description
For your image alt tags

These are all suggestions made by the Yoast SEO plugin, which is why I suggest you install it. I made sure that for my post which is first on Google, my keyword phrase was in all these places.

Now we know what our post is going to be about, we need to pick a title for it.

4. PICK A TITLE THAT WILL RANK FIRST PAGE ON GOOGLE

As well as using your long keyword in your title, you need to pick a title that’ll rank. Make sure you pick a title:

PEOPLE WILL ACTUALLY SEARCH FOR

Whilst I’m happy my post is first, how many people do you actually know searching for “How to make your Pinterest look professional”?

This was my big mistake. If you search for “How to make your Pinterest”, there are other suggestions by Google, none of which follow with “look professional”. So whilst there are lots of results for it, there aren’t lots of people searching for it.

For this post, I did a lot of google search to see exactly how people search for wanting to rank high on google.

Even if you just type in how to rank, google suggests to search for “higher on Google” after it. Meaning that’s what people are searching for!

WITH LOW COMPETITION

My post ranked first despite the high number of results. Make sure you pick a title that people are not only searching for, but the less results, the better. It simply means the less websites you have to compete with!

5. USE RELATED KEYWORDS THROUGHOUT YOUR POST

My post that ranked first didn’t just have the long keyword “Pinterest look professional” sprinkled throughout it. It also had words relevant for people that would be interested in making their Pinterest look professional. These included:

Group boards
Re-pins
Get more followers

And more. Using these words as well shows Google I have thoroughly covered that topic, and my post is more suitable for someone who’s interested in making their Pinterest look professional than the post after me.

HOW TO FIND RELATED KEYWORDS

You can find related keywords by using Google to search for your blog post title using different phrasing, and seeing what related words come up. So for this post, I know people who want to rank first page on Google also want to do it quickly and for free. Therefore I make sure to use those words in this post.

(If you want to rank first on Pinterest, check out this post all about Pinterest keywords!)

6. WRITE OVER 1000 WORDS

The yoast SEO plugin suggests you write a post that is 300 words minimum.

However for my post and what I suggest for your post to rank first page on Google is to make sure your post is over 1000 words long.

For that post I actually wrote over 1500 words. But do not write for the sake of it. Some of my posts are under 300 words, but still get a lot of page views from Pinterest because they offer freebies. Try to write over 1000 words, but remember; quality not quantity.

7. USE LOTS OF SUBHEADINGS

For that particular post, I wrote in small sections split up by subheadings. It made my readability score good as well as my SEO, as I could use the keyword in each of the titles.

It also means that google can pull an excerpt from your post as a preview.

I’m not really sure why random words in the snippet are bold, but it’s better than nothing!

8. I LINKED TO OTHER RELEVANT POSTS

A great way to improve your SEO is to link to other posts on your blog. I do that for all my posts, and that one was no exception.

I linked to 4 relevant posts within that post. The more you can link to, the better. Just remember to only link to posts your readers will actually find helpful and want to read!

9. MAKE SURE YOUR POST LOADS FAST

Google will penalise you and rank your post lower if the loading speed for your blog is slow. So make sure that your blog loads fast!

I’m working on this, and a great way to do it is by using smaller images. I use this plugin to reduce all my image sizes:

10. SEO OPTIMIZE THE REST OF YOUR BLOG

There are other little tips and tricks that will help to boost your blog SEO, and in turn will help your posts to rank first. I will write another blog post on this soon!

It’s important to remember nobody really knows how Google ranks their pages, so you could do all these things and not rank first. But these are all the things I made sure to do on that particular post and on my blog so I rank first page on Google, and there’s no harm in trying them!

If this post has helped you rank first page on Google, please pin it on Pinterest.

Otherwise check out these other posts on getting blog traffic:

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