If you are trying to increase your chances at free organic search engine traffic, then you no doubt are aware that the holy grail of this endeavor is a ranking on the first page of Google’s search engine results. And I’m not talking about paid, sponsored ads either. I mean the organic, search-driven results that occupy the main bulk of the page. There are many tactics to get these rankings, and a great number of them work in concert, but if you are going for this type of traffic, here are some things to bear in mind!

There are estimates out there that say that the first position on the first page of Google accounts for between 70-90% of the traffic for that term. The numbers fall precipitously from that point, to where if you’re not on the first couple of pages, you won’t be seeing many visitors.

That’s not to say that a position in the top 100 is worthless; it’s merely that it represents a place to build from. Actually, it’s a good thing to start out somewhere in the SERPs, (search engine results pages) as it means that you’re indeed indexed, and not a resident of the dreaded Google sandbox.

One of the newest marketing ploys for SEO services over the last few years is to try and get you to “dominate” the search engine results, by “owning” the first page of the search results for your given keyword term. While this sounds great, and can be achieved somewhat easily for VERY longtail keyword phrases, doing so for a term that actually gets a significant amount of traffic is another thing entirely.

Multiple entries on page one are the result of great internal and external linking strategies, on page SEO, relevance, and whether or not you’ve achieved a page one SERP result that’s linking to these other pages on your site that you hope to rank. Obviously, the keywords need to be the same, which is to say that you can rank multiple pages of your site for the same keywords by utilizing some of these strategies.

Other high ranking links from social bookmarks, videos, social sites and web 2.0 sites can also help not only with your page’s ranking, but can also rank there all on their own, increasing the benefit. This type of linking from “parasite” sites seems to be losing steam, however, and may not be effective long term.

The key to long term stickiness seems to be, not surprisingly, great content over a period of time. While this may not be what the quick hitters (who often use combinations of these techniques for fast, seasonal scores) want to hear, it is the truth of long term rankings for competitive terms.

Once you’ve scored at least one first page result, not only concentrate on keeping it, but also enhancing it, by ranking other pages on your site. The higher and more comprehensive your page one presence, the better!