All things being equal, the average website has the potential to occupy, at the most, two of those eight slots allowing everyone else at least the chance of providing some competition. All fair and good on the online world, except perhaps it’s not quite so. If a first page listing on Google is vital to your online business (which in almost every case it is) you should also devote energy and time to squeeze out those competing against you by occupying more than one slot on the first page of Google.

Here’s a classic example. Go to Google.com and type in the search box he query ‘SEO Help Book’. There are (as I am writing this) just over six million competing pages there for that search term. For all that really matters there could be 300 million. What I want is my site to appear on Google’s first page (which it does) and not only that but it appears as an embedded listing which means that it draw more attention and gets me more traffic and, at the same time, takes one more of the 10 available slots on Google’s first page. That however is not enough. After all there are eight more slots where a competitor can work on the potential online visitor I am looking to attract.

In the offline world, if you want to squeeze out competitors you make sure that you offer great products and saturate all the publicity channels available to you and Google’s first page is no exception. In order to get there in the first place the optimization of your web page and its content has to be exactly that which the online visitor is looking for. Provided that is done you then need to saturate it and this is exactly what has been done here. Of the ten available slots on Google’s first page ‘SEO Help Book’ dominates six, allowing just four available slots to anyone to try and capture the attention of my public.

Dominating the first page of Google is a great way to make sure that those looking for you are best able to find you so the question here is how is it done? Well, without spending any more money than it costs to buy your time if you are serious about dominating Google’s first page you need to do the following:

1. Create a perfectly well optimized web page on your website which features the particular search term you have in mind.

2. Optimize your website content so that you get an embedded listing when the search term you have in mind comes up in the search results. If you are not quite sure how to do that yet check out my free SEO tips on how to get a nested listing on Google’s organic search engine results page (SERPs) and double your website’s traffic. 

3. Put in place a coherent, well-organised off-page search engine marketing (SEM) campaign.

4. Develop a plan whereby you create off-page content pointing to your page in a logical, structured way.

Sit back and enjoy the results.

David Amerland is the author of the Search Engine Optimization book: SEO Help: 20 steps to get your website to Google's #1 page published by New Line Publishing and available to buy from Amazon.com and any quality bookshop. The ebook version of the book is available for Amazon Kindle as well as  Mobipocket, smartphone and Sony eBook Reader formats and available to purchase from any quality ebook retailer. You can also purchase it directly from this website. He masterminds winning SEO strategies for complex online business and helps the average webmaster get their site to the position it deserves. David has been instrumental in taking websites to the top of Google's first page in a way that has kept them there year after year. If you would like David to work on one of your SEO projects drop us a line with your request.