I got questions from visitor’s everyday about how to improve search engines rankings. While Google has rolled out updates on how to rank better, in essence, it all boils down to producing a well-made, mobile-friendly, content-rich website. Google tries to provide the most relevant search results to their customer—the searcher. Your site needs to focus on providing the best experience for your customers. And Google will reward that.
Before we get too far into the how and whys of search engine optimization, let’s talk about the basics of search. Search engines, like Google and Bing, use programs called spiders to work their way through the entire Internet. They crawl all the pages available to them and store a very basic version of that page in their database. Then they create what’s called an “index” of all the pages that they can crawl with their spiders. As part of this process, they look at the words or word phrases on each page. So when you search for something in Google using a word or word phrase, the search engine uses a program to rank the stored pages and display the page that best matches what you searched for.
Now that the basics are out of the way, we can look at how this applies to your website. Anyone using a search engine is trying to solve a problem or fulfill a need. Your website may be the answer they’re looking for, but how will one of your pages stand out from all the others on the Internet? It’s all about content.
Content is King!
What is your web page about? Why does it exist? Customer-focused content creation is the key to driving web traffic to your site. Google is trying to help the person who is searching (your customer) find what they need. You need to focus one page around one specific keyword or keyword phrase in order to rank well. This requires you to think about what your customer will be searching for to find this page.
Your Target Audience and Action
You need to know your target audience and what motivates them in order to build compelling, customer-driven content. Once you have the customer engaged in the content, you need clear action steps that the customer can follow to complete their task.
Keywords and Key Phrases
The relevance of the search result is based on many different factors, but keywords and key phrases on the web page are most important. Every use of the keyword in the page content adds weight to the total relevance score of your web page.
Place your primary keywords first whenever possible in:
· The domain name or the page URL
· The page title (what you see in the tab of the web browser)
· Headers, both main and secondary in the content
· Paragraphs
· Links
· Image names
But don’t force the keywords; work them in naturally. Once again, this is a page that your customers want to find, so write with them in mind.
Rule of Twos
The first two words, two sentences, two paragraphs, two headlines, and two links are the most important.
· Search engines place weight on keywords and other content according to their prominence and position on a page.
· We need to consciously evaluate our keyword placement to follow the rule of twos.
· Always place the main keywords first whenever possible in a sentence, paragraph, bullets, links, or other content.
0 comments