So you’ve started your own business and are now looking for clients or customers, which is excellent! But where do you begin? Well, the first step might sound like common sense; if you want to be found, make sure people can find you. The good news is that there are many ways to do this online.
Unfortunately, there are always bad apples out there who will try anything to trick a potential customer into clicking on their site through search engines by using blackhat techniques such as spammy link building and keyword stuffing. Google has been making efforts to crack down on these tricks over the past decade and has even gone so far as to implement an entire algorithm (called Panda) dedicated solely to filtering out low-quality websites from the top results.
This doesn’t mean that you have to wait for Panda to go away before people start paying attention to your website! There are still many search engine optimization (SEO) techniques that can be used safely and will help improve your search rankings. This article aims to teach you some of the fundamental basics of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization: what it is, why it’s essential, and some high-quality ways in which you can implement SEO on your website.
First, let’s begin with what SEO is:
Search engine optimization involves fine-tuning a website’s content to make it more appealing to both Google and other major search engines. This ensures that once users find services or products that they’re looking for, their search results will be quick and efficient. For example, if a user is looking for a plumber in New York City, an optimised website should appear first on the list of Google’s search results. ‘80% of major purchases start with online research, even if the purchase itself happens in a store.’
If your website doesn’t rank as high as it should be, don’t worry because there are many ways to improve your rankings! First off, remember to make sure you have unique content on your page; this means no duplicate images or text from other websites.
Google’s algorithm Panda specifically targets sites with identical or copied content to make them less privileged in the indexing system. Secondly, use relevant SEO keywords to match the content you’re providing users but don’t keyword stuff! This means that Google will pick up on the fact that if you’re putting keywords in your page for something completely unrelated to what you’re saying, it’s just an excuse to get more traffic. It may take a few months until Google picks up on these changes, but they should significantly improve your rankings over time. Just don’t use blackhat techniques like spamming links or buying fake likes or followers.
How to get to the first page of Google
Google is the most heavily used search engine globally and is the best way to drive traffic to your website. The first page of Google rankings is crucial for getting leads and sales because ‘a number 1 position in Google gets between 26% and 32% of clicks.’
You can get on that front page more often by writing good content on what users find meaningful about your topic. I’ve talked about it many, many times throughout all my SEO blog posts.
Google uses crawling bots to gather information about websites, including things like how it responds to different user agents (web crawlers, spiders, etc.), how fast it loads, security features being used/what kind of SSL certificate is being used, if any redirects are being used within site or outside resources, whether there are any broken links, etc. There are also things like page rank and domain authority to consider.
Free Broken Links CheckerAs you can see, Google has a lot of different factors that go into the algorithm used to measure how important each webpage is within the overall pool. Each element helps narrow down which web pages should be prioritized in their results for a user’s search query.
What does it take to get front-page results? First page ranking on Google depends on Googlebot successfully crawling your site to know what your website contains and then index your website within its database. Some quick ways that you can boost this process will be covered below:
First and foremost, create unique, informative content: It almost goes without saying at this point, but you cannot have a successful website without good content. First page ranking on Google depends mainly on the amount and quality of your site’s unique and informative content. Whether through text, images or video, make sure that you’re giving users what they want.
Build links: Link building is not as manipulative as it used to be. However, you still need to make sure that your site is linked in the right places. First page ranking on Google depends mainly on the amount of authority and relevance each link has. First off, you want to get links from other websites in the same industry, so they’ll count for more than, say, getting a link from an entertainment website when your website focuses on digital marketing. Also, try not to overdo it. Too many spammy or irrelevant links will turn away users and Google alike, so stick with quality content that inspires people to share!
Receive positive reviews: First page ranking on Google also depends on how well you attract organic traffic via inbound links and user engagement driven by relevant content.