How to Get on the 1st Page of Google | Awesome Checklist for Beginners

Feb 20, 2023

Hello! I have been doing SEO for a long time - first I worked in a small web studio, something like a startup, and then I became a freelancer and help small businesses to take the first lines on the Google search page. I can talk about SEO optimization endlessly, however, I thought that it would be nice to make a checklist of actions that you need to do in order to take the first position in the search engine and mention the mistakes that so many people make. On the one hand, they may seem like a trifle, but these little things make up the competition for the first places on the first page of Google. Take your time and check if your site satisfies each of the points below.

Broken Links

Google really dislikes sites with links that lead nowhere, or more specifically, pages with 404 errors (that is, the page was not found). Judging by my experience, it most often happens that some pages were renamed during development, and were completely forgotten about at the publishing stage of the site. Not only do you not get views for content from a page with a broken link, you also worsen your position in Google search engine. In this case, even perfectly selected keywords will not help you return to high positions.

Hostinger - 404 Error

Sites can be very large, and manually clicking all possible links is very difficult and stupid. Don't do it. You can use any online tool that was created specifically for monitoring broken links. There are a huge number of them. I use DeadLinkChecker. I'm quite satisfied with its functionality and speed.

DeadLinkChecker - Interface

This tool monitors absolutely all dead links from the domain you specify, including links leading to external resources - YouTube videos, links to Amazon products or social networks, whatever. And the most important thing, in my opinion, is that the tool simplifies the search for a broken link in the code, indicating the file name in the report, as well as the link text itself. This greatly simplifies and speeds up the work.

Looking ahead a little, I will say that eliminating dead links is very important and useful for successful page indexing in Google search engine. In other words, in one of the next steps that I will mention, Google itself will direct you and point out dead links, but only internal ones (that is, those that interfere with the navigation of your site for users). For full-fledged monitoring, I advise you to use online tools, for example, like the one I indicated above. So you don't miss anything.

Sitemap

Sitemap is a site map. Who would have thought. Seriously, this is a very important file that many people forget about when developing their site. At its core, this is an XML file that is a list of all links in your domain - links to your posts and pages with the date of last modification and a priority indicator (this is a coefficient from 0 to 1 that shows which page in the search for other environments from your domain should be higher , and which one is lower in the search engine).

For you, this file may not be useful, but it is needed for Google search engine to clearly recognize the navigation between pages and their hierarchy. Again, there are many tools that will make this XML file for you quickly and for free. I wrote about one of them in this article, if you haven’t read it, you can read it.

The tool is intuitive. All you have to do is provide your site's URL and tell the XML file after the download is complete. This file must be placed in the root folder of the site (that is, it must be in the same folder as the index file). There is nothing complicated in this, however, without this file, no one will ever see your site and your organic search traffic will be zero. However, this is not all that needs to be done with this XML file.

Google Search Console

If you are thinking about developing your site, then you must be able to use the Google Search Console. This tool from Google allows you to manage the pages of your site in the search engine. Here you can monitor how many impressions each of the pages of your site has, how many clicks from the search engine on the link, what is the average position of your links in the search engine, and so on. Now it is important for us that the Google Search Console indexes each page of our site so that each page appears in the search engine. Here we need the XML file we just created.

Google Search Console - Sitemap

To index each of the pages, we must explain to Google what pages we have, that is, show the sitemap and link to it. After that, each URL must be submitted for verification. It always takes a different amount of time and I think it depends on the busyness of the bot that checks it. But it usually takes a day. It never took me longer. Now the pages of your site will appear in the search engine.

Google Search Console - URL Inspection

In general, Google Search Console is a very useful tool that you should master. It is not difficult, but it has great potential. Here I briefly ran through the subject of our article, but I recommend that you familiarize yourself with the official documentation. I think that there you will find a lot of useful and new things.

Headline Studio

This is not advertising, I use their tool, and I like it. Headline Studio is one of the best tools for analyzing the title of your web page. This utility analyzes your title and suggests improvements based on the latest keyword trends and general topic wording to keep the reader interested. A very multifunctional tool, so if you decide to seriously start promoting your site, I highly recommend paying attention to it.

Headline Studio - Interface

I check all my titles before publishing a web page here. There are a huge number of other SEO optimizers that will select not only the right title for promotion, but also point out errors in the web page (for example, an alt tag for images that was not specified or an incorrect hierarchy of h1-h6 headings), but to be honest, I don’t use any of them. Then and do it myself. Headline Studio is enough for my purposes.

I won’t talk about other SEO optimization tools, since I used them very little, and I think it’s wrong to share an opinion that is not experienced in this matter.

Styles

Many also forget about this point. Try to organize the site architecture so that you have one single file with CSS styles. The reason for this is very simple - the fact is that Google loves sites that load quickly, visiting which the user waits no longer than three seconds before starting to scroll. This is logical. Speeding up the site is a separate huge topic, which I will write about some other time. For now, I will focus on the fact that the styles that you apply greatly affect the fast loading of the site.

My Styles Folder Organization

I used to have at least 4 files with CSS styles, just because it was more convenient for me to work, but as soon as I combined everything into one file, indicating comments so that I would not get lost later, I clearly improved the performance of my site.

I've met people who are obsessed with web page loading speed and who insert CSS styles directly into the HTML code. Yes, it’s really faster, because you don’t need to load external files, but here you need to strike a balance between speed and developer convenience. This code will then be impossible for the developer to understand.

Conclusion

I've broken down some of the steps that are critical to getting your site to appear on the first page of Google because, let's be honest, it's rare that anyone gets past the first page. These steps do not guarantee you the first place in the search, no one can guarantee you this, and if they do, do not believe it, but they will bring you much closer to this peak.

I hope you learned something new today, and I wish everyone to take not just the first page in Google, but the first place among other pages. Good luck!