To increase visitors to your website you need to be at the top of Google search rankings. You can increase search engine rankings by following these essential tips.
Get your website noticed
You might offer great products or services but if people don’t know your website exists, it’s all in vain. Google matches what people search for with websites in its index. It takes various things into account, including the topic of the content. It picks up on this through the keywords people use on their site.
So let’s look at how to increase search engine rankings to get a high position in those all-important search engine rankings.
1. Improve the speed of your website
Numerous SEO factors go towards getting good rankings on search engines. One of these is the speed of your website.
If your website is slow to load it affects your ranking and visitors are more likely to click away from the site before it has even loaded up. This affects the bounce rate and the crawlers of search engines take this into account.
You might have visited a website yourself that takes ages to load up before you can read the content. More than likely you will have got tired of waiting and left. Now can you see the importance of a fast website?
So, how fast is fast? Well, ideally you want your site to load in less than two seconds.
If you use WordPress as the base for your website you can add on a plugin to help speed up your website.
2. Your website has to be mobile-friendly
Ensuring your website is mobile-friendly is a very important factor in SEO. This is because Google relies on mobile-first for sites.
Your website has to be able to load up and look good on all devices, whether it is desktop, tablet or smartphone.
When viewing a site on mobile the text has to be large enough to read and clickable elements should not be too close together.
The website should also load fast and it should have a menu that is easy to access. The site should also not have pop-up ads that take over the whole of the screen on a mobile device.
If you have WordPress as your website base you can easily see what your website looks like on a mobile device. Just head to the “customise” tab in the WordPress dashboard and then click on the mobile view at the bottom left-hand side of the screen.
When designing a website in WordPress you should always choose a responsive theme. This helps to adjust such as the size of the text to whatever type of device the person is using.
3. Make sure you use relevant links
Another valuable part of your SEO strategy to increase search engine rankings is to use relevant links in your content.
When talking about internal links we are talking about the links you make to your content and external websites.
Links to external websites should be authoritative and relevant to the content. The website you are linking to needs to be trustworthy and credible.
So, how do external links help you? Well, websites can track links and they may see that you have linked to them and repeat in kind by offering you a backlink.
Internal links can also be to your content on your website. In this case, you should make sure the content is relevant. When someone views your site they may then click the link to read additional content and this helps to keep them on your site longer.
To increase search engine rankings make sure your title tags are optimised.
Always use your main keyword in the title tag and make sure it is relevant to what the content is about. The title will give search engines and readers a good idea of what the content is about.
A good title tag can help you to rank higher in search engines as Google will match the keywords with what people are searching for online.
5. Images can help
Images, videos and infographics can all help to increase search engine rankings and are great ways to break up the content.
You should use your main keywords in the images and infographics and they can be used to generate backlinks.
6. High-quality content
High-quality content is essential on your website. Keywords should be used throughout the content naturally, never force them to just get them in.
You should never overstuff the content with the keyword and you need to use related words in the content. This gives search engines a good idea of what the content is about.
The content should provide the answers to the questions that people ask. It should be informative and to the point, not filled with fluff.
Preferably, you should aim to write long-form content. By this, we mean around 2,000 words. Generally, long-form content ranks higher than blog posts of 500 words or so. Longer posts also mean you can talk in-depth about the topic you are writing about.
You should always use headings and subheadings with the relative H tags, such as H1, H2 and H3.
To summarise
It is important to reach a good spot on search engines as this is the only way your site is going to be noticed. If your site doesn’t rank on page one of Google, and in the top half of the rankings, it might as well not be anywhere.
Follow the above essential tips to increase search engine rankings and make sure your site has had an SEO audit. An audit will tell you where improvements can be made.
