How To Get Your Site To The Top Of Google

Prior to starting to make changes to your website, first you need to find out if your site has been hit by either the Panda or Penguin updates or more recent algorithm updates.

Penguin hits the over-optimized keywords hardest, so the most used search terms will be the ones showing the largest ranking drops. If you analyse your back-links using http://www.majesticseo.com or https://ahrefs.com/ you will see the keywords that are in your back-links.

Linking Profile

Back-link anchor text density requirements dropped overnight and today you need the absolute maximum for any keyword to be 5% or lower. The bulk of your back-links should be URL links, brand links or junk links.

Use your company or website name for Brand links. Make sure that you use a large variety of URL links.

Getting links from different IP addresses is crucial for your back-linking strategy. Aim to get inbound links from content related sites. The sites that link to sites linking to you are more important than ever, for this reason, look for a good ‘trust’ score for your link-building.

Google Penguin likes to see links coming from domain pages that themselves have backlinks, so look for established pages to acquire links from where possible.

Link Networks

Don’t use automated link networks to build links because the quality of those links will not be high quality. Google penalize sites it finds using link networks.

If you use an SEO link building company to create new links for you, you should make certain that they don’t use, or haven’t previously used any commercial link networks for your link building because Google’s web spam team are actively seeking out these networks and will find all of them sooner rather than later and when they do, the sites that are caught using them will face Google ranking penalties which are expensive and time consuming to recover from.

On-Page Requirements

Don’t go mad with your content keyword density, less really is more for the new Panda algorithm so strive for around 2%. Including text links in your content pointing to authority sites (.gov, .edu) is a good practice and will boost the performance of your site in SERP’s.

Web Content

Unique content is extremely important. Always write good quality content that doesn’t appear anywhere else online. It is a sound practice to link out from your site content using ‘contextual’ links from suitable related words in your text to relevant information pages. You can also hyperlink to authority site content using contextual links.

Use of Images and Photo’s

Using pictures to separate your content into more readable sections will make your content more inviting to your visitors. A great video may also help to keep your visitors on your pages for longer, giving you better user engagement metrics.

For each image that you add to your content, add a keyword or phrase as alt text behind the picture. Vary your alt text keywords for each image used.

Your web site quality score will be affected should you have spelling errors, grammatical mistakes or bad punctuation. Be sure you use a spell checker on all your fresh content before you publish it.

Additionally, you will suffer massively if your site isn’t mobile friendly. This means that for visitors using tablets and smartphones, your website needs to deliver a different version of your website that is optimized to be easy to use on those devices.

Google friendly web design will guarantee that your site is fit and healthy and ready to rank in all the major search engines, not just Google.

Writing over 500 words on a page is proven to give you a ranking advantage. You should always write as much content as you need to so that you can cover this issue, but 500 words is a great benchmark to strive for.

Concentrate on your website visitors when writing new content. You need your website visitors to engage with your content and to spend time reading it instead of hitting the back button. If people like your content then Google will too.

The process is called latent semantic indexing and lets you write much more natural text without having to keep repeating your main keywords in order to rank for them.

Description Tags

Be careful to check the meta data on each page of your site. Duplicate description tags will cause you to be penalised in the search results.

The click through rate from SERP’s to your site can be improved by writing teaser meta description tags. Use your meta description tags to inspire more clicks and increase your sites user engagement metrics.

User Engagement

Google measures the content load speed of all the websites in its index. If your page loads too slowly then you will be demoted in Google’s results.

The quantity of visitors that don’t like what they find on your site and hit the back button is called the bounce rate. According to SEO³, your bounce rate needs to be 55% or less for top Google rankings.

Page Views

Increasing the average page views per person will improve your search engine rankings because Google uses average page views as an indicator of website content quality.

You can enhance your Google rankings by raising the average time that visitors spend on your website. Google relates time on site with content quality and relevance.

Website Performance

The performance of your website design online is related to not just how efficiently your site works, loads and displays your content, but how your visitors interact with each page.

Search engines track and measure the path each visitor takes, not just to reach your site, but what they look at when they arrive, how long they stay, what actions they take, etc.

With this information they can determine how relevant your content is for the search term the visitor used to find you.

If the visitor doesn’t stay on your website and ‘consume’ your content then it is reasonable to suggest that this content isn’t ideal for the search term used because it failed to provide an ‘answer’ for the visitor.

Find out how to improve your traffic conversion metrics and optimize your website for performance at Deeho, Bedford based optimization experts who specialise in making websites work.

As a consequence, you will begin to drop down the rankings if the bulk of your visitors don’t like your content very much, and also you will rise up the rankings if the majority of your visitors view several pages and take time to read your content.