A number-one ranking within Google’s organic search results is valuable because you don’t pay for the resulting clicks. That’s why you need a website that conforms to search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques.

It is hard to determine how relevancy is calculated as the algorithm is often changed, and realistically only Google really knows what it is, but there are ways to improve your chances:

Page content

Content is very relevant to your business and the products and services you offer. Is your content unique? And is it useful and of a high quality? Pictures speak a thousand words but without the ALT description Google does not know what to do with it. Text is what Google can and does scan but careful not to overload it with keywords, you might get penalised.

Content freshness

Is the content fresh and original? Does it touch on a current subject? A website without new content gets stale and Google knows about it.

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)

is the standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. This link ensures that all data passed between the web server and browsers remain private and integral.

Google is starting to take this into consideration from the beginning of 2017. You see if a domain has SSL if they have a lock next to the domain name in your browser.

Read more about the use of SSL here

Domain name

Is your brand well known, so people would put your brand name as a search keyword? Then maybe use the brand name over the business name. Or think about what people would search for if they would want your products and services and register a domain name with these keywords. You can have more than just one domain name for the same website.

Register a new domain name

Domain authority

Is the domain linked to from other trustworthy, business-related domains? Are those links gained in a natural way? Does anything look suspicious? Could you partner with other website owners whereby you deliver good quality content with a link to your website mentioned in it. Think about what value you could add to other websites?

Domain age

An older domain might have more trust than newer ones.

Define your keywords

Keyword research should be the starting point of your campaign, so think about what phrases or words will take too long to rank via SEO.

A common mistake when choosing words and phrases is to select generic terms that will never be able to boost your growth. By learning to recognise which words and phrases you need to target you’ll gain an insight into how your customers search for and find your website.

Another error is using three or more keywords per paragraph, which means you run the risk of being accused of ‘keyword stuffing’. There are penalties for this behaviour that could impact where your site appears in search engine results pages.

Measuring results

The best part of SEO and inbound marketing as a whole is the ability to track and refine the entire process. Numerous tools are available that allow you to keep tabs on your website, traffic sources and user engagement. The free analytics tool Google Trends, which is used for keyword research, allows you to see what others search for and even plots on a graph how often a term is used over time – pinpointing geographically where most people are searching for a given term.

Other tools such as Google Webmasters are essential for understanding how search engines see your site. It will help website owners and web marketers monitor performance in the Google search index and gather information about search traffic, while offering technical status updates and crawling data.

 

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