Looking to improve your websites search engine ranking?
In this article we will be covering 10 points that will help you get better results in search engines.
Sign-up with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
You must first inform search engines like Google, Bing, and others that you exist before you can make your website available on them. Webmaster tools are one method for doing this.
Webmasters can use the free tools offered by all major search engines to:
- Learn what information search engines have about your website
- During the crawling and indexing phase, look for mistakes
- Learn which keywords brought up your website in the search engine results
- Submit an XML sitemap
- Receive notifications of issues with security
Create a sitemap and optimise it for
search engines
The next step is to construct and submit a sitemap once you have used the various webmaster tools to check your website.
1 – Create a sitemap
The most popular sitemap format is XML, and depending on your platform, you may generate sitemaps automatically using a variety of programmes.
2 – Optimise your XML sitemap
Optimize your XML sitemap so that it only contains the most crucial pages from your website.
3 – Submit your XML sitemap to Google
Send Google and other search engines your sitemap. Google will check your website for modifications after just one sitemap submission.
Verify and correct crawl errors
A website must be free of crawling and indexing issues in order to be found on Google.
The crawling and indexing phase is the first action conducted by search engines before even picking which websites to present in the top places of the results.
If there are issues during this phase, a website’s visibility in search is decreased.
To avoid this:
- Log in to the Google search console
- Locate the COVERAGE report
- Find and fix any crawl errors
Make sure your site is quick and responsive on mobile devices
Check your Google Analytics reports, paying special attention to the DEVICES report. It is likely that users and pageviews from mobile devices will outnumber those from desktops.
This is due to the fact that users are increasingly using their mobile devices to search Google, which has two implications for webmasters.
First, you must have a website that is optimised for mobile. Nowadays, having a mobile-friendly website is insufficient.
A website is not mobile optimised just because its content displays without horizontal scrollbars on mobile devices.
Make sure that crucial information is displayed above the fold and that intrusive popups or welcome banners do not detract from the user experience.
Second, especially for mobile users, your website must load as quickly as feasible. Speed is a well-known usability and SEO ranking element. Websites that load slowly perform worse on mobile devices and see fewer conversions.
What qualifies as a quick website? A mobile page should load in under 3 seconds, according to Google.
According to our experience, the only way to reach this figure is to implement SEO-friendly web design principles and develop for mobile first before desktop.
Regularly post intriguing and pertinent content
All of the aforementioned recommendations were technical in nature, but you need more than that to increase the visibility of your website on Google.
You must have material that is:
- Unique and captivating material that fulfils the user’s objective while not being a copy of or comparable to other online publications
- Content that is SEO-friendly and targets specific keywords and search terms that search engines can read and understand.
- Well-written and comprehensive – High-quality content is thorough (studies show that the average length of a post on the first page of Google is 1800 words)
- Content that is current – Nobody, not even search engines, wants to read information that is stale or no longer pertinent.
In addition to having a website with quality current information, you should regularly add NEW stuff to it.
“Updating” refers to the publication of fresh content aimed at particular keywords.
There are several reasons, but these are the most crucial:
- It’s likely that a newly published page won’t rank for any keywords if it receives no rankings in the first three to four months after publication
- If you don’t start building links to your published content, it will be “lost” online when the Google crawler visits your website to check for updates
- The likelihood that your website will rank for the keywords you are targeting will rise if you routinely publish new, targeted content. This will encourage the Google bot to visit your website more frequently and crawl the fresh content
Target long-tail keywords
Be judicious when deciding which keywords to use in your blog entries. Always avoid going after highly competitive keywords because you might not be able to rank or receive any visitors.
Go after long-tail keywords instead, which are simpler to target. It is more likely that you will be able to rank highly for these terms because they have lower search traffic and fewer competition.
Seventy-five percent of searches are for long-tail terms, a figure that cannot be disregarded.
Optimise your title and meta descriptions
Before you hit the publish button, make sure that your page is optimised for on-page SEO.
This means that you need to include your target keyword or semantically related keywords in the following places:
- Page title
- Page headings
- Meta Description
- Page content
Avoid over-optimising and loading your content with keywords; this is never a good idea. Instead, aim to make your material pertinent to any possible user searches.
Promote your brand online
Getting noticed by other websites and people is one strategy to boost the visibility of your website in search results.
Search engines view links to your website as “votes of trust,” and one of their goals is to display highly regarded websites in their results.
If Google has enough evidence to support the claim that this is what users prefer to see in search results, it can detect these signals and raise a website’s rankings.
For instance, if you write a post and it becomes popular on social media, search engine recognition of the post will increase considerably more quickly.
Conduct a website audit for SEO
Finally, conducting an SEO audit is another technique to increase the visibility of your website in search engines.
Only a handful of the checks you need to perform to make sure your website is fully optimised for search are those I’ve just mentioned.
A thorough SEO audit can assist you in identifying the components of your website that require improvement, starting with the structure of your site, target keywords, UX considerations, content SEO, backlink profile, and more.
Get in touch if you would like to know more, or call us on 01625 666900.
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