The first page of Google reportedly receives 95% of all web traffic. Only another 5% will make its way to the second page and beyond. So, if you are not ranking on the first page, you will experience little traffic to your website.
While there is no magic button that can rank your site at the top of Google, there are things you can do to boost your position in the search engines. Check out the 10 ways to improve your website’s ranking.
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Learn About Google’s Algorithm
The first thing you must do is familiarize yourself with Google’s algorithm, which the search engine frequently changes. In fact, Moz has estimated that Google makes between 500 to 600 changes per year.
The flux of the algorithm will ultimately determine your place in Google, so you must be able to adapt your online marking strategy to complement the search engine’s requirements. While Google never makes major announcements on its changes, there are some tried and tested methods that seemingly work, which you are about to go into…
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Improve Your Site Speed
Site speed is a major Google ranking factor. A slow website will have next to no chance of ranking #1 in Google. You can have the best product in the world, but a slow site could be detrimental to your online business, as it can affect your ability to engage and convert visitors into customers.
Retail giants Walmart reportedly experienced a decline in online custom once their page load increased from one second to four seconds. So, avoid penalization and speed up your site.
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Review Your Website’s Health
Poor site health can result in a sudden loss of organic traffic, or even deindexing from Google altogether. Ensure your website is in tip-top condition by using health report tools to identify major problems affecting your site, such as issues with your mail server, webserver, DNS, blacklist or general site problems. In addition to health issues with your website, the domain age can also determine your ranking. For example, Google values seniority and it often contributes to #1 rankings in the search engines.
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Track and Measure Metrics
Tracking and measuring your metrics will provide you with a detailed insight into the workings of your website. For example, you must learn how many visitors discover your website via Google, social media or paid search. Connect your website to Google Analytics to identify your organic or non-organic sources of traffic, as well as the keywords that are generating web traffic. You may need to alter your strategy to rank for both commercial and informational keywords to maximize your online reach.
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A Mobile Friendly Website
If you are yet to offer a mobile friendly website, you must add it to the top of your list. It is one of the biggest ranking factors on Google, so you can trust your site will not make it onto the first page – or even the second. Ensure your site offers a responsive web design so it can adapt to all mobile devices, such as laptops, tablets and smartphones.
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Create a Sitemap
A sitemap is an essential component on any website that wants to rank highly in Google. Its job is to tell the search engine about the organization of content on your website, so the search engine can quickly crawl your content, which can improve your ranking in the SERPs.
What’s more, it will provide detailed metadata about when a website was updated, the frequency of changes made on your website, and how pages relate to other pages. Find out more at Slickplan create sitemap.
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Eliminate Unhealthy Links
In the words of Matt Cutts, “links shouldn’t just look natural, they should be natural”. That is why you can trust unhealthy links to your website will not work. Bad links can and will hurt your site, which is why you must routinely review inbound links to your pages. Harmful links will often come from websites with zero or N/A domain or page authority, with next to no traffic, and sites from the same IP class address.
If you have an unhealthy link profile, you can request a manual link removal by contacting the site owner. You can also use Google’s disavow tool if you are unsuccessful with a manual removal. While Google cannot remove the links on your behalf, they can prevent the link juice being transferred to both your page and content.
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Keyword Research
Keyword research is an effective element of any inbound marketing strategy. You will initially need to understand how your target market finds your website in the SERPs by visiting the Google Keyword Planner. A table will show your keywords and their monthly search volume. You will therefore learn what information your demographic wants to know and why they want it. You can then shape your content and headlines to produce articles that rank highly in Google searches and that will grab their attention. Aim to incorporate both long-tail and short-tail keywords into your copy to improve your Google ranking. Yet, don’t be tempted to stuff your website with keywords, as the search engine only values high-quality, contextual and natural keywords phrases.
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On-Page SEO
Once you have boosted your site speed, removed unhealthy links, performed keyword research and introduced a sitemap, you should then focus on improving your on-page SEO. For instance, you must optimize your meta descriptions and title tags to provide descriptions related to your target keywords. However, don’t be tempted to use the same title tags and keywords, as you must diversify to enjoy more traffic opportunities.
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Write and Publish Exceptional Content
Give Google a reason to rank you highly in the SERPs by producing well-written, informative and engaging content, which features natural keyword phrases. Unfortunately, many websites do not value the importance of high-quality, regular copy, which can increase a site’s appearance in the search engines, convert visitors and can help to keep a site fresh and updated.
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