Improve Your Rankings
Whether you have a website for your hobby, your business, or anything in between you are constantly striving for better engagement. You want more clicks, more visits, more traffic, and more time spent on your content. In this mix is one of the most coveted desires of every page on the world wide web; to rank higher on the Google search page. This article is here to guide you towards observable growth within Google’s Rankings so that your business can stand out and get the increased click throughs that you desire.
Understanding the Algorithm
To master the Google Algorithm, you need to have a solid understanding of how it works and what it looks for within your content. While the search engine giant never reveals all their secrets, we do know some of the key factors that they have continued to prioritize through many evolutions of their algorithms.
Relevance
This is the most obvious but also one of the most important key factors. Your content must be relevant to the search terms it hopes to rank for. Your business selling outdoor equipment has no business listed with cooking instructions or DIY crafts for kids. While these are extreme examples, make sure that your content is targeted only to keywords that are directly connected to the content you are trying to promote with them.
Quality
Quality is another important factor for Google’s Algorithm. While quality can be a subjective term, it is one that you must hold yourself to a high standard with. Your best foot needs to be the one put forward when creating and publishing anything on your website. High-quality, informative, and engaging content leads to better results.
Authority
Google wants to know just as well as your users that you are the right source to talk about anything you claim expertise on. Backlinks are a great way to build that trust between your website and the algorithm, letting it know that others are validating what you have to say.
User Experience
How polished is your website? Are images and links loading quickly? Is your content optimized for both mobile and desktop screens? Are your menus direct and easy to navigate? These are questions that the Google Algorithm will be asking itself as it reviews and ranks your content, so make sure you are asking yourself those questions as you put it together.
Strategies to Improve Upon
Now that we’ve discussed what the Google Algorithm prioritizes, let’s look at practical steps you can take to help boost your rankings.
Keywords
Keywords are a major component of gauging relevance. These help identify the intent of your content as well as what subjects it is going to cover. Do your best to incorporate these keywords organically into your content, utilizing them in titles, headings, and descriptions; in addition to the text itself. Choose your keywords strategically and with specificity. While you don’t need a paragraph length keyword, you can utilize short phrases to help narrow down specific topics or subjects discussed.
Content Quality
The quality of what you place on your website matters. This doesn’t just mean high resolution images and video, but content that is well-rounded, researched, verifiable, and meets direct needs or inquiries of your users and potential users. Try to create content that meets the needs or answers the questions you see being poised through search engines as well as social media.
Visual Optimization
How your content looks and how easy it is to navigate plays a critical role in where it lands within Google’s rankings. Fortunately, there are simple steps you can take in order to visually optimize your content. This includes simple additions such as headings to break up content flow and organize passages. It may also include tags, meta descriptions, and even alternate text in case images do not load correctly or are taken down.
Mobility and Voice
When optimizing your website, it is critical to remember that desktops and laptops are now in the minority of devices used to view content over the internet. If your website is not designed with mobile display or voice search in mind, you are losing out on valuable traffic in addition to the hit your rankings may take for not considering these platforms. Fortunately, most back-end hosting platforms are already equipped to help reformat your content for these evolving new platforms.
Linking
Linking requires partnership, but there are few other proven ways to build credibility faster and more effectively than via links and backlinks. Work with partner organizations to help build each other’s backlink profiles by linking to relevant content within each other’s websites, blogs, and articles. See where you can credit or shout out others and invest the time and effort into encouraging them to link back.
Engagement
How are you encouraging people to interact with your content? Is space made available to comment? Are links posted below to assist with sharing to various social media platforms? Is there an FAQ section where questions can be asked, and answers made public? A major component of your search engine rankings is how much users can engage with and interact with your content. Boost your rankings by fostering opportunities for discussion and follow-up.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization is a big term and is often a multi-step process. It is critical to ranking well on Google and other search engines. Utilize SEO plugins on your website to help analyze the relevance of keywords, any broken links or images within your content, consistent directory information, and any repetitive topics across your website. SEO is an invaluable tool in your toolbelt and content that has not been optimized can quickly tank while optimized content can deliver near instant results when ranking on Google.
Try and Try Again
Lastly, and most importantly, remember to look at Google rankings as a continual process. As you continue to put out new content, make sure to look at it through the lenses we have discussed today. The more your try and improve your content, the more you will discover what works for your website and what does not. Keep at that process and keep refining it in order to deliver the best results not just for yourself or the algorithm, but for your audience.
Featured Image
Image by Photo Mix from Pixabay
