You’ve just recently designed or built your website. You can’t wait for everyone to see all your great content, impressive looking graphics, and your interactive pages. You check your stats every day, but your visitor stats remain low. You begin to realize that in order for people to visit your website, they must first be able to find it. You start to clue in to the fact that your website needs to be one of the first to pop up on Google, or at least gets listed on the first page. Who doesn’t want to be the king of the search engines for their keywords? But how in the world do you do that? Here are three core ways to improve your rankings on a search engine results page (SERP).
Content Is King…
There are many things that have evolved through the years since the first website was ever published on the World Wide Web. However, one part of websites that have always been important, and that will most likely continue to be for years to come, is content. As they say, content is king, and when it comes to having a successful website that will probably never change. The trick however, is that your website shouldn’t contain lots of irrelevant information just to have words on each page. In other words, you cannot just have content, it has to be great content – stuff that makes people want to go to your website again and again. Search engines like good content, especially the kind that contains relevant keywords. Something else search engines really like is content that gets updated on a regular basis, and one great way to do this is to add a blog to your website. As you can see, this blog hasn’t been updated in a few months and it’s probably hurting our search engines ranking.
Metadata is a Must
Metadata is what gets used to describe each page of your website. This information is vital for search engines as this is what gets used to determine what each page is about. There are three components to metadata. These include: page title, Meta description, and keywords. The page title for your website is what gets displayed in the search engine results. It should include the name of your business and a keyword that describes it. The page title should contain between 50 to 60 characters as Google displays only the first 55 characters. The Meta description is exactly what it sounds like – a description of your page title. Using relevant keywords, the Meta description should describe what each web page is about. It should be between 150 and 160 characters long. Finally, keywords are the words that visitors to your website used in Google, or other search engines, to find out information. The keywords are not listed on the search engine results page, instead they can be found on the page source. In this day and age, keywords are almost not a factor and you’ll want to ensure that you’ve included your keywords in the page title, meta description and throughout your website. The goal is to ensure that they’re naturally placed and not stuffed everywhere as this could hurt you.
Don’t Forget Your High Quality Links
Something else search engines really like are links, which they use to find and “crawl” your website. While it is super important not to forget to link, that’s not all there is to it. To improve your SERP rankings, your website should contain high quality links. There are a couple of key ways to do this. First, don’t just use “click here” as your anchor text. This text should describe the page your visitor will go to when they click on the link. Equally important when it comes to linking, is making sure that the page your visitor gets taken to, is an authoritative one. That’s where all your hard work in writing great content comes in. Also be sure that you’re not getting links from spam sites or over using keywords in your anchor text. Again you want your link strategy to look natural for google and other websites typically use your business name or url.
One last note you’ll want to keep in mind as I wrap this post up. Be sure to link within your website to other relevant articles or service pages. Inner linking is a great way your readers and search engines can find other great content on your website. It can generate a sale or increase your rankings for those keywords! Contact us if you have any questions or if you would like to discuss our SEO services! <– See what i did there
