Unlike traditional media and advertising, search engine optimization can be very hit and miss. The search engines are always improving their services which means that the methods that they use for ranking websites changes which causes fluctuations in a website’s position in the search engine results pages (often shortened to SERPs by the SEO community).
However, there is a lot that you can do to give yourself every opportunity to rank well. So here are a few tips to ranking your website better in Google.
Great Web Design and Architecture
First and foremost make sure that your website is well designed. Both visual design and the coding need to be good for SEO. A great looking website will attract attention and encourage people to talk about your site – this is actually a vital and much overlooked aspect of SEO.A website must also be well-built. There are many factors which can hinder a site in the search engines, such as slow loading pages, poor use of styles and javascript, incorrect image formats, broken links and even orphaned pages. Ideally a site should be built on a solid CMS (content management system) which ensures that errors such as these are avoided.
How your site is structured also affect how efficiently the search engines can crawl and index your site. A website with a good navigation and index will provide search engines with all the important pages very quickly whereas a poorly structured site can send the search engine robots (such as Google’s Googlebot) on a wild goose chase before it finds the most important content.
Website Copy / Content
Once the design and structure of the site is determined you need to focus on the website copy. This is a vital area for search engine optimization and is the area which most people focus on. When writing a webpage you should always ensure that these key elements are completed (a good CMS makes this task a lot easier);- Each page should have a unique TITLE which contains important keywords while still making sense to humans
- Each page should have an H1 Header which is the main visual title of the page. This should entice the reader to read more while also containing important keywords.
- Each page should have a unique META Description. This does not affect the position of a page in the Google index but it can affect the chances of somebody choosing your page over the others, i.e. it can increase the “click thru rate” of your listing in Google.
- Each page should also make use of secondary and tertiary headers (H2 and H3) whenever possible. This indicates to Google that the page is well structured and offers readers several distinct parts and also makes the page easier to skim read.
- Try to avoid very short pages, if you have several small messages to give consider amalgamating them into one page.
- Each image should have an alt tag and a title tag to tell the search engines what the image is about.
- You should ensure that articles and content is always unique, both unique to your site and not duplicated on other websites. This is a very important factor in SEO today.
- Pages should always strive to provide the reader with the information which they are looking for. Check your logs on a regular basis to check that searches match with page content. The closer the match, the more happy readers, the more likely they are to recommend your site to others.
- If you allow commenting on your site ensure that it is well moderated and that you reply to questions and comments. Engaging clients is a good way to turn them into repeat customers.
- Write a blog. Produce regular updates which will help to draw in new readers and create new leads. Whether it is company news, product updates or industry news, a regular blog keeps your site fresh and most importantly keeps Google interested!
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