Search engines chose the best web pages based on their ranking. Ranking refers to your contents position on SERPs. This means that if your web page in the first result when people search for a keyword, you have a #1 ranking.
Ranking is important because more often than not visitor’s rarely move past the first page of a search engine, giving life to the saying “The best place to hid a dead body is page 2 of Google’s search results”.
Because no one goes there.
- Keywords
Keywords are a rather important factor of SEO.
If you aren’t sure what keywords/keyword phrases your visitors use your time spent reading this article was in vain. There are many ways to find valuable and worthy keywords in your industry.
One tool I use is Google Keyword Tool which helps me to find the competition a keyword/ keyword phrase has and how many times visitors have searched it. Find your primary keywords.
- Google ranking pages
I mentioned the importance of ranking. But how do you beat out all your competitors to rank at the top of the search page?
Two words. Authority and relevance.
Search engines promote authority pages to the top of its rankings. Authority can be measured for your whole domain or a single page located on your website. While it is difficult to measure the authority of a page, it all bubble down to quality.
If search engines feel that you are writing content that people find useful, your website will measure higher authority.
How do search engines measure the usefulness of your page? Well, they let others do the work for them.
The more times your web page is shared through others in blogs, links from their website or twitter, the more your page will send out authority signals. Over time, this will create stronger search engine rankings.
Relevance is another aspect that helps building a web page’s trust. Search engines examine the relevance of your site against the keyword searched by the visitor.
How do you increase the relevancy of your web page?
If your website mentions a certain keyword multiple times and is also included in your title tag, chances are it will seem more relevant to the search. This is also known as on-page optimization where the best way to get ranked is to write a lot of content, giving you more opportunities to use your keyword.
However, putting in too many keywords can be viewed as ‘keyword stuffing’ which could make your rankings drop. Therefore, make sure your keywords fit your content naturally.
- Link Building
Great content encourages other websites to link to your page.
Your web page will be able to rank higher in google with more link’s from other pages. Inbound links are more favored by search engines because it shows that other web pages consider your content useful.
However, while there are tactics to build inorganic links, Google is strictly against this. If caught doing so it could lead to lower ranking. Therefore, the best way to gain ranking through links are is to have great content that is worth linking to.
The higher the relevant links on your website, the higher SEO points you will receive.
You can secure links by getting featured in new sites as well.
Now that you have put to time to optimizing your website, it is important to constantly evaluate to ensure maximum optimization through tacking and analytics.
- Tracking and analytics
It is important that you re-evaluate your hard work constantly to make sure it is working.
With the online rules changing constantly, it is important to stay one step ahead and readjust your efforts to best achieve your online goals.
You can track your rankings and jot down the changes you make to that you can analyze the effects of your efforts on your rankings.
There are certain sites made just to help you with this. Google Analytics will give you a history of tracking analytics that will help you achieve your goals.
While the above points will help you to optimize your web page to become the best version of itself and attract more traffic, there are a few other minor tweaks that can help you too.
Search engines favor shorter domain names rather than long domain names. The more relevant the content presented to the domain name, the more search engines will trust that you are putting out good and helpful content.
They also take into consideration the compatibility and functionality of your website design. Since the modern crowd surf the web on various devices, search engines prefer mobile-friendly websites and those that a compatible with every device.
The length of your content matters too. Research shows that websites or blogs that have more length rank higher.
Therefore, it is important to keep these in mind when creating content on your web page.
At the end of the day, what will get you great traffic is consistent hard work. Writing great and useful content while optimizing your keywords and making it easier to share and link to it should give you results. Hard work does pay off!