We are often asked  "What is the one thing we can do to get a good ranking in Google?" It is like people are seeking that one special ingredient that, when corrected, or implemented or incorporated into their website will instantly pump up their ranking.

There are any number of snake oil internet sales pitches floating around that seem to encourage this perception. You know the "Google front page in 24 hours" type of push. Well we have to say "You need more than just one magic bullet."  What gets your site ranking in Google is good on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

These are not overnight results. On-page optimization by and large is within your control (with the right advice and understanding) whereas off-page optimization is a far longer slog but certainly builds a fortress around your ranking when done properly. We describe it as alignment and consistency - the keys to on-page optimization.

Alignment refers to the keyword research you need to do in your business segment or niche to determine what keywords have the appropriate search query volumes in the right geographic locations. Alignment also takes in other matters like the online commercial intention (are the keywords "buying" words), appropriateness to your business (a shoe shop optimized for "business suits" is not a winner) and are the keywords really what they say (for example does "welder" refer to the person who welds, or the machine that lets the person weld).

Consistency then refers to how you use the chosen keywords on your site. It is things like making sure keywords appear in the URL, in the page title, in the page description, in the copy on the page at the right density, etc. But it goes further. Many sites have way too many products offered on the one page – it confuses search engines because they just see a webpage with a whole pile of different products. Where possible, make each product (or group of similar product) its own webpage and optimize the keywords for this page differently to other pages. This may all seem fairly unexciting and ordinary, but we can tell you that virtually every website or blog we are asked to review or improve makes these same fundamental mistakes.

Once you get these basics in place, then go hunting for suitable back links to your site for off-page optimisation.

Think of the process like building a stone wall. Once you have the foundation, you build the bottom course stone by stone, you then build a second layer stone by stone – eventually you have a six foot high solid fence, all made out of individual stones. The foundation is having a domain and hosting package, each well researched keyword is a stone, each URL with the keyword in it is another stone, and so on and so on.

Get it right and eventually Google cannot ignore your site. So, always remember that the ranking of every website or blog lives or dies by getting the alignment and consistency right first.

Marshall and Gary