What are the best ways to improve a site's position in Google?
What are the best ways to improve a site's position in the Google search results?
Here are some rules I follow:
- Try not to repeat content.
- Try to get linked from other, relevant and high quality websites.
- Try to make sure your outgoing links are relevant to the content of your site (rel="nofollow" for ones that aren't, such as ads).
- Give each page a relevant (and unique) title.
- Add in a meta description to each page describing the contents or purpose. Keep in mind that meta descriptions are not used as much today.
- Mark up your site using schema.org, if applicable, to display rich snippets.
- Build a sitemap for your website and submit it using Google Search Console (but be aware of their limits).
- Keep content unique and relevant to your website.
- Use HTML correctly (<hn> tags, titles and alt attributes on images).
- Try to use relevant keywords in the URL.
- Ensure a fast load time.
- Use HTTPS for everything.
- Make sure that your site is mobile friendly and use the mobile friendly test.
Generally, if you follow these rules, your domain will naturally rank better with Google over time. If you try to speed this process up, using things like keyword spamming on your website, this is likely to be picked up and blacklisted by Google so avoid this wherever possible.
A lot of people look for technical tricks for SEO and ignore the big picture. You need both. Your SEO (and business) strategy is every bit as important as SEO tactics. There are more than 200 SEO factors that go into rankings, but here are a few of the more important SEO factors that I've experienced, both tactical and strategic:
- Have a website worth visiting. If
your website isn't designed for users
first, most of the time it won't do
well in the search engines. - Make your site crawlable. Don't rely on Flash or JavaScript
navigation. If you need to use
JavaScript, use it to enhance an
existing (X)HTML menu, not create it.
You won't even need a sitemap if your
site is crawlable in the first place
(but it doesn't hurt). RSS feeds also help you get crawled. - Make a bigger website. Backlinks matter and internal links from your
own pages count. The easiest, surest,
and most efficient way to get
backlinks is to increase the number
of pages on your site. The bigger
your search engine footprint, the
more weight you have to throw around. This is one of the reasons blogs are recommended for SEO. - Get your title right. You get 65 characters to create an on-topic
incentive for the user to click on
your search engine listing. Use the
opportunity wisely. Your best keywords should be in the title. However, it's not just
about using the right keywords;
it's also about catching the user's
attention while still signalling that
your page is going to be relevant and
helpful to them. Use Michael
Masterson's Four U's Method: Be
Unique. Be Useful. Be Urgent. Be
Ultra-Specific. Stronger titles use
more U's. Remember that your title is
often used by social media sites to
link to your page as well. - Get your anchor text right. Use keywords that are also helpful to
your users. Never use the infamous
'Click Here' or 'More...' text as a link. - Get a handle on duplicate content. It's far too easy to
create duplicate content.http://example.com,http://example.com/,http://www.example.com, andhttp://www.example.com/are all
considered different URLS. URL parameters also create duplicates:http://example.com?a=1&b=2andhttp://example.com?b=2&a=1are both different URLs. Use Apache or
whatever server you're using to
manage your redirect rules so this
doesn't happen. This needs to be a consideration from the beginning and should be solved both programmatically and with server redirects. - Don't waste time asking for links. There is no bigger waste of
time and money, IMO, than emailing
other websites offering to do link
exchanges. Think about the time spent
searching for relevant websites,
emailing, responding, and
implementing a link exchange. What's
your hourly wage? Now think about
economies of scale and how many times
you have to do that to make a
discernible difference for every page
of your website. There is no way that
you can possibly come out on top.
There are easier ways to get links. - Make your site sharable. All those little social media widgets?
They might be annoying, but when used
properly, they make it easier for
your users to share your content. The
caveat here is proper context.
Privacy policies, terms of use,
registration, and other pages of that
ilk are probably not good candidates
for a widget. - Viral content works. But you need to use it wisely. Not every
announcement on your site is going to
be or should be viral. It has to make
sense and it needs to be
well-thought-out. Ask yourself
objectively, why would someone link
to this? If you can't think of a
good answer, you should go back to
the drawing board. Again, the 4 U's
help here. - Incentivize linking. A great way to kickstart a viral campaign or even
a more moderate but steadily growing
external link profile. Think contests
and giveaways, but also think
Stack Overflow's badge widgets. - Build a community An audience of loyal readers will link to and share
your content naturally.
User-generated content increases your
website's footprint and also
incentivizes linking. - Remember the big picture. Why are you doing SEO in the first place?
What is the purpose of your website?
It's easy to focus so much SEO that
you lose sight of what you're trying
to do. If you're trying to make money
with your site, don't forget that you
also need to focus on the usability,
the design, the copy, the offer, the
product, the checkout process, etc.
SEO is only a small part of that.
Edit: Incidentally, one of the reasons Stack Overflow does so well in the search engines is because it has an enormous community that continually produces keyword-laden pages. It gets a lot of the basic tactical SEO right too, but this is an excellent example of big-picture thinking that most people ignore. SEO is built into the design of the community as an extension of the way the community functions. That wasn't an accident.
The absolute best long term strategy is to have lots of relevant content that is updated frequently and is easily accessible to your site's visitors.
To boost your rank:
If the issue about seo, google, ranking, google-ranking is resolved, there’s a good chance that your content will get indexed and you’ll start to show up in Google search results. This means a greater chance to drive organic search traffic to your site.
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