4 Ways to Increase Your Website’s Search Engine Ranking
Think about your website for a minute and think about the type of content it offers to the consumer. Now, type a few words into a search engine that summarize your website. Did you see your website within the first 5 websites listed on search engine? How about on the first page? If your answer is no, you might want to learn a little bit more about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is the process of improving a website or blog so that it can be easily found by search engines to attract more visitors. Your goal is to be listed on the first page of results, specifically in the top 3 organic results because these searches earn almost all of the clicks. This blog will list 4 ways you can optimize your website so that search engines can find your site and rank you higher in the results.
Soapbox - Increasing your search engine ranking
Keywords are KEY
Search engines work by sending “spiders” to crawl through a websites content to find out what that page is really about. Search engines are looking for answers that are trustworthy and relevant to what is being typed into the search box. Keywords will clearly tell the search engine what your page is about. If you don’t have relevant keywords on your page, you likely aren’t going to be found by the search engines at all.
Start with keyword research, and if you need some extra help during the selection process check out a keyword tool like Hubspot’s Keyword tool. Once you’ve narrowed down the long tail and short tail keywords best suited for your website, focus all your content creation around these keywords.
Earn the search engines trust
As stated before, the search engine is going to scan your website for trustworthy answers to the searchers question. Linking to relevant, reliable sources helps build the trustworthiness of your site. Avoid linking to too many different sources though – you’ll only want one or two links per paragraph otherwise your page may look spammy.
There are two types of links you can leverage to increase your ranking:
- Inbound links
- Outbound links
Does your website have another page that relates to content of the page you are working on? Linking to relevant internal pages from your website drive traffic to those pages. More traffic results in a higher level of trust with the search engines. he more visits a website gets, the higher it will rank because the ranking system is based on popularity and authority.
Obviously you won’t want to drive traffic away from your website, but including outbound links on pages such as blog posts shows you have done your research and gives your readers more helpful resources. Including outbound links to your blog gives the readers a chance to dive deeper into topics that you mentioned but may not have wanted to expand upon in your blog post because it wasn’t the main focus of that particular blog or didn’t support your keywords. In this case, quality over quantity is preferred.
Earn links to your content
Just as you will be linking to others content, you want others to link to your content. Earning links to content on your website or blog is a surefire way to increase your search engine ranking. By having other articles link to your content it makes your website appear trustworthy and authoritative to search engines. This is called off-page SEO. Search engines will follow links between pages to see how they are related to each other. The links coming to your website are called in-bound links.
Inbound links assist search engines in determining how authoritative your website is. If a trusted site is linking to you, your website becomes more trustworthy. Make sure you are earning links from existing authoritative sites in your industry. It will be time consuming, but focus on building relationship with content creators in your industry. This is an effective way to keep your company top of mind for people who might be interested in linking to you.
There are also some quicker ways to earn links to your content. You can setup a page in one of the top online directories such a Yelp, Yellow Pages, and local chambers of commerce. Not only will having your company’s name on these directories increase your links, it also increases citations (mentions) of your business page online.
Be a promoter
Once you have fully optimized your website, it’s time to start promoting to drive traffic to your site. Remember, the more visits you have the higher your rank will be in the search engine results. If you want to rank on the first page of results, you’ll need to increase traffic. Start with sharing links to your site via social media. These could be a link to a recent blog post, a certain landing page you are trying to post, or even just a general link to your homepage or catalog.
Another way to promote your content is including call-to-action links inline with your emails. If your company sends promotional emails to an email list include links to different parts of your website that correlate with the content in the email campaign. You can also add your website homepage to your email signature if you frequently send external emails to customers, or prospects.
Put one or all four of these tips to the test when editing your website to to boost your search engine ranking. Using all four tips in tandem will result in the best success for your SEO, but try starting with one or two to see what works best for your website.
