Written by Erin Aldridge
Hi everyone!
If this is your first time coming across my blog, welcome! – and if you’re returning, thanks for coming back! This week I wanted to focus on a topic that is vital to a successful website, but isn’t always talked about. Search Engine Optimization, and more specifically, search engine rating.
When is the last time you made a Google search and looked past the first page of results? Probably never, or rarely. If a company wants to be competitive with other webpages, it needs to strategize and work to get their website on the SERP, or Search Engine Results Page.
In this article, I detail 3 key strategies to get your webpage to rank. These aren’t just tips for businesses and companies, blogs and small organizations should use these tips too! Everyone can benefit from proper webpage ranking strategies.
Firstly, it’s important to spend time focusing on target keywords/phrases. Instead of focusing on just one phrase, we want to rank for a list of search phrases to target for improvement of our search rankings (Larson). Our choice of phrases should be based off of 4 factors, relevance, traffic, competition, and current ranking (Larson). The phrase should be relevant to your webpage and it should have search traffic or demand. Additionally, you shouldn’t choose a word that already has a heavy amount of traffic, as a new website would never reach success competing for that phrase. Lastly, you should focus on moving pages higher up on the ranking that are already near reaching the SERP page (Larson). Choosing a successful group of search phrases will ultimately lead to your website getting noticed. This is a vital step, but not the only important one. After all, the most important way to raise your rankings is through quality content.
Content, content, content! At the end of the day, without quality original content, your webpages won’t reach the rankings that you want them too. Content should be quality, original, and fresh (Larson). One great way for a company to ensure that they reach these three criteria is to create a company blog. Blogs are a great way for companies to have casual conversation with their customers, and talk about the latest topics and trends within their industry (Wertz). In the long run, this will help your search engine rating because it will enable you to use those keywords/phrases that I talked about above. But always make sure to be natural and user-friendly when using your keywords, otherwise it can come across like you’re word stuffing (Michigan Tech). When someone types a keyword into a search engine, they are really looking for that good content that answers their question or relates to their phrase, so use your platform to create content that matches those keywords that people are searching for! You want your visitors to leave your website happy that they entered.
The last important tactic I’ll leave you with is links. From someone not in the marketing world links may just seem like an added feature, but to those of us who know, links are vital to a webpages search engine rating. Links come in all shapes and sizes; they could be natural outbound, paid, natural internal, and many more. All are important, but I’ll be focusing more on natural outbound links. Natural outbound links are those that are relevant and fit naturally into an article (Larson). A webpage earns higher ratings when other websites have linked your websites content to their own. This shows a search engine that you have high quality content worth “endorsing”. Search engines weigh natural outbound links more than the others when rating a webpage, thus they should be important to anyone trying to raise their rating. There are many ways to achieve natural links (or earned), but the best way is through editorial links. Editorial links occur when you create and promote high quality content worth using. Again, a great way to achieve this is through blogs. Using videos, visual content, and expertise when appropriate is a great way to increase your number of editorial links.
If you get anything from this article, it should be that the most important way to get your webpage to rank is through really great content. Content that is high quality, uses target words/phrases, and is easily “linkable” will gain good traffic and overall increase the websites ratings. Search Engines are looking for webpages that know what their consumer wants, and gives it to them. So work hard on that website and make sure that the content is centered on your consumers! After all, isn’t business really just about giving people what they want?
Thanks again for reading!
Check out some of these articles that I referenced throughout my blog if you are looking for a little extra learning.
“Five Ways to Improve Your Site’s Ranking (SEO).” Michigan Tech, Michigan Technological Institution, 2019, https://www.mtu.edu/umc/services/digital/seo/.
Wertz, Jia. “4 Things You Can Do Today To Boost Your Website’s Google Ranking .” Forbes.com, Forbes Media LLC, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jiawertz/2017/01/19/4-things-you-can-do-today-to-boost-your-websites-google-ranking/#2bb34069163f.
Larson, Jeff, and Stuart Draper . https://edify.stukent.com/app/publication/d801ea3f-55b7-4374-ac5a-03d0e2cff93f/cb47ca6c-e25b-460e-a11e-acb31043218b/9360d5e9-ea3c-4674-83a9-306ae005add1/25fcd625-0453-4844-8075-d4799d62f0a4/view.
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https://www.adlibweb.com/6-seo-strategies-to-improve-your-webpage-ranking/
