Everyone wants their webpage to be the top result of a Google search. Consumers are most likely to click on the top few webpage results, so it is important to get your webpage on that first page by having it highly ranked. It needs to be in the top 10 SERP results. SERP stand for search engine results page. This is done by SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.
Start With a Strong Foundation
If the website has a poor structure and information architecture, it doesn’t matter how strong the SEO is. If your website is difficult for users to navigate and Google to crawl, your rankings are likely to suffer. Think about “usability first” on a mobile platform. That is the pathway to success. Mobile searches have become the most common, so if it is user friendly on mobile devices it is set up to succeed on computers as well.
Strong Backlinks
Backlinks are links from other sites to yours. They are one of the most heavily weighted Google ranking factors. Incoming links to your website content from high-authority domains show your site’s authority, bring in traffic, and improve your search ranking. Don’t abuse forms of links, spamming links can ruin the webpage. If it is relevant than use it.
Keyword frequency
When a certain keyword appears more frequently than all others, it serves as a relevancy factor for your content. Having a primary key word and a set of related secondary keywords that will help move the consumer to your webpage.
Optimize Images
High-quality images on your business website not only enhance customer experience, but Google considers images when indexing. Since computers only read words, make sure Google can find your photos by using keyword-rich titles. The descriptions of on-page images send important signals of relevance to the search engine as well.
Optimize Speed
The search and loading speed is important for consumer satisfaction, but also for improving SEO. This can be done with browser caching and script handling. Browser caching stores these resource files locally on the users’ computer. That way, when a user navigates to a new page, those resources need not be loaded again. Script handling can be done by minifying your files by stripping comments, for instance, to keep things running fast. If it’s possible to merge several scripts into a single file then do it. That way, there will only be one retrieving call to the server to load all the scripts.
“Chapter 4: On-Site SEO” Digital Marketing Essentials, by Jeff Larson and Stuart Draper, Publishing by Edify, 2018.
Price, Chuck. “5 Proven Ways to Increase Your Google Rankings.” Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Journal, 9 Oct. 2018, https://www.searchenginejournal.com/improve-google-rankings/246483/#close.
“15 Reasons Google Doesn’t Rank Your Site (And How To Fix It).” BuildFire, 28 Mar. 2018, https://buildfire.com/reasons-google-doesnt-rank-site-and-fix-it/.
