This is the start of several articles I'm going to write about Search engine Optimization and getting your site well ranked in Google. I say Google rather than other search engines due to their massive share of the search engine market. But get this right in Google and you can safely assume that your rankings in Yahoo, MSN and other search engines will be just as good!

IMPORTANT - It's important to note right at the start of these articles that there is no quick fix to get good rankings in Google so you should avoid like the plague any company offering "Guaranteed Rank 1 in Google!" This just isn't possible (if they sell this to two customers how can they both rank number 1 for the same search phrase?)

IF you work hard and do the right things then your site will rank well it's as simple as that. There's no quick fix and these companies are basically scammers after your hard earned cash.

The same is also true of the software packages claiming to get your site Ranked top in Google automatically by using their software.

"For only £165 you can Rank Top in Google just by using this program!!!"

WRONG Google hates the use of these Automatic submission programs, it knows when they are being used and will often black list your website or throw it into their Sandbox which basically means you will languish at the bottom of the rankings.

It's a fact of life that there are many people and companies out there trying to con genuine people who just want to rank well in Google. I've seen companies charging £1000+ for a SEO service and giving back such poor quality of work I find it difficult to understand how they sleep at night and the clients site still doesn't rank well and gets very little traffic.

So how do you rank well in Google??

Well there is no one thing you have to do but a combination of things, get this formula right and you will rank page 1 in Google (should I say guaranteed??) NO definitely not! Lol No one knows Google's algorithm But I would bet my sons PS3 (if you new my son you would know this is as good as a guarantee!) you will rank on page 1 for your chosen search phases!

I will also be letting you into a few trade secrets and tools that I personally use so let's begin at the beginning!

You have a web site

You have a nice shinny new website that cost you hundreds of pounds but its no where to be seen in Google so what do you do??

Well to start with it's a good idea to tell Google that your site is now online. Google has its own tool for doing this: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools you will need a Google account for this which is free. Then run through the instructions and submit your site to Google (you will need to verify that you control the site). You will need to come back to this site as it gives you lots of analysis about how your website is progressing in Google.

You will notice while you are here that you have the option to upload a sitemap. This is basically a list or URLS that you submit to Google to help it index your site so it knows where all your pages in your site are. But how do you do this? Well its time for a trade secret! I personally use this piece of software:

http://gsitecrawler.com/ It's free to download and it will run through your online site and produce an XML Sitemap file. You then go back to Google's webmaster tools and upload the site map, it will then verify that everything is ok. There are many sitemap tools out there and most of them you have to pay for but to be honest I've used several of them myself and gsitecrawler is as good as any of them and its FREE so it gets my vote. And if you really find it useful you can always send them a small donation.

Now Google knows about your site and has an index of all the pages on the site. You're now on the road to getting your website ranked on page 1 of Google!

In the next Step I will be talking about Keywords use the right ones and traffic will pour to your site!