These days, over 90% of all online experiences start with the user engaging with a search engine. The power of search engine optimization (SEO) is astounding. Thus you must increase your Google search ranking to be viable.
Below, we investigate some of the best ways for you to boost your SEO to get your website on the map, and on the first page of Google searches. By the end, you should have a good idea of the steps that you will need to go to to move forward in your plan to dominate the Internet.
Audit Your Site for Common Errors
There are a few things that you can complete before putting research into your image online. These are all technical things that prevent Internet crawlers from becoming lost on your site. Many of them also stop people from reaching potential pages on your site that might be useful.
Related: Learn how to perform an SEO Audit
Robots.txt
This file informs search engine robots of which pages they can crawl and gain data from as well as which they cannot. You should ensure that you optimize the most important pages you have that contain the best information. You can then link to any other pages from within.
XML Sitemap
If you have a large website, it means that it can sometimes be hard for a crawler to find information on your site. A complicated sitemap will create a mess, whereas a broken sitemap will stop Google from finding information on all your pages. Ensure that the sitemap is valid and that it shows the information you need it to.
Set up HTTPS
If you have not set up HTTPS correctly, then any site that auto-fills with HTTP:// will not find your content. It will appear as a broken link, and this turns people off from your site while also not showing on Google. Make sure that these both resolve to the same place and prevent any confusion in this regard.
Remove Duplicate Content
If more than one page has the same content, make sure to remove the excess ones. Have all information go to the same page if necessary, and allow the context of the page to inform people of what they should read. If you need several pages, use canonical tags to inform crawlers of which of these instances is the primary one.
Empower Social Sharing
If people link to you more often in social media posts, it will look as though your site is influential. You will thus rank higher on Google and other search engines as you appear to be an industry leader.
You can empower people to link to you more often by including social links on some of your pages. Share buttons, or the facility to copy information with a URL to a clipboard, can increase this further.
Related: Pages every website should have
Fix Broken Links
Your SEO rankings may plummet if any site crawler discovers broken links in your website. You will appear to be a site that has fallen into disrepair and become less useful to those who might want to look at it.
You can run your site through many websites or other tools online to search for broken links. Any of these can inform you of where you need to fix them to ensure that the link works. Either remove these links or update them to where the relevant page is instead.
Improve the Readability of Your Site
You might be wondering how to rank higher on google without increasing the number of pages or without engaging anywhere else. In this case, a simple method would be to reduce its complexity. An especially technical site can cause people to turn away. This can also push any Google crawler to consider it a niche interest site.
By reducing the readability to that of around grade 9 or 10, it encourages those who are new to the subject to engage with it and drive up discoverability. Any higher than that, and you risk dropping further down in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Link Articles Together
One of the main ways that your website can continue to stay relevant is by always creating content. This is also referred to as internal linking. If you often have people returning to visit your site, it looks much more like it is something that would be of interest to others. This encourages Google to increase your SERP moving forward.
If you make use of a blog page or article list for your site, a good idea would be to often link articles together. This may only include linking to old articles. Though, if you also look at legacy articles and create links to them in them newer articles, that can help to boost how useful your site appears to crawlers.
Link to Voices in Your Industry
Your Google SEO ranking does not only take into consideration how many other people link to you. If you also link out to other relevant websites, your site will look like it is a part of a larger community of websites, and your credibility increases.
This might at first seem like it does not make any sense, because you are pushing people to other sites. Though, if people think you are a hub of good information, they will return to your website for more information. This is also referred to as external linking.
Seek out popular and authoritative voices in your industry. Avoid competitors, but try to find blog posts that these industry leaders have created. You can then use them to create your own posts, linking to them as a source and giving your post much more merit moving forward.
Make Yourself an Authority
While you might want to write posts that link to others (as above), that does not mean that you should not make a name for yourself too. Posting your articles in local Facebook groups, on Linkedin, medium, and other platforms can help you come across as an industry leader.
When people start to pay attention to what you have to say, people will likely start to link to you as a figure of authority. At that point, you will have the eyes and ears of more people. This will allow you to start guiding users to your own products or services. Your search rankings will increase as your popularity increases.
Pay Attention to What Your Competitors Do
One of the major ways that you can improve your Google ranking is by doing what your more successful peers do. Pay attention to the steps that they take when promoting themselves online.
There is every chance that they have put in the effort to learn more about the space that you both occupy. You can save yourself time by copying what they do, then learn how and why it affects your SEO later. This gets you going from the outset without needing to put time aside to get up to speed on the ins and outs of your industry’s online space.
Use Infographics to Revamp Old Content
As people have less time to read articles, one of the best ways to ensure that you have a punchy and snappy blog post is to create an infographic.
You can pull all the data from your old blog post. Using that data, you can create a single graphic that encapsulates everything that it was going to say. If you do not have the expertise to do this yourself, you can always work with an artist or marketing company to help you create it.
Generate Backlinks
Another great way to improve your search rankings is to not only link out to others, but to encourage other websites to link to you.
Medium, LinkedIn, or social media sites all allow you to post content that can then link to your own website. Each of these slowly adds to the buildup of external links. People can follow these links to access your content.
You can write these yourself, or commission others to create them. Companies out there exist that can create SEO-generating content for you.
Learn More About Google Search Rankings
With the above advice, you should have the ability to take action that will increase your Google search ranking. Your Google SEO ranking is important, but you might not always have the time to focus on it. For that, you might want to think about engaging with a content marketer.
We can talk to you about what your marketing needs are and how we can help with them. Our specialists are ready to have that chat if you need it. So, pick up the phone and ask us what we can do for you today.
Originally published . Last updated .
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