Top 5 Tips to improve your website’s Google Ranking and SEO
I work with clients to help them get their website up the ranks so I’ve spent a lot of time researching how this works. Here are my top tips for getting started:
1.WordPress
WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems in use today for building websites easily from scratch without any coding knowledge needed. I always recommend building your website on a platform such as WordPress. WordPress is ‘open source’ which means it is free and anyone can add to the code. Why is this important? Well, it means your site can stay relevant with any Google updates. It also means you can do anything you want to your website such as embedding code behind the scenes, adding widgets, or changing the little things like branded footers. With most of the other WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) builders, you have to pay all the extras to change any code and fully customize a site.
2. Yoast
Yoast is a free plugin on WordPress and is super easy to install. It’s all about SEO, and a great place to start. Yoast has a paid version too, but you can do lots on the free version. Yoast helps you see how your website pages will look on Google. You can easily view and change how your Title tags and Meta tags are looking to someone searching. It also had a schema section to get those Google featured snippets happening.
3. Content
Google is basically a person. Don’t write for Google, write for a person. If a user likes your site, then so will Google. Users will leave a site pretty quickly if the content is blah and bland. Therefore Google will do the same. If you have copied and pasted your info from somewhere else a reader will know and so will Google. Also don’t just copy and paste your info from one page to the next across your whole site. Google doesn’t like this either – Google can tell when all your information is the same one page to the next.
If you are doing a blog post make it about something good, something people are searching for. I always thought blog posts were a bit dorky, like writing about your family holiday. But no, tell us the important things. The things you are telling your clients all the time. A good post should be around 800 words. 300 wouldn’t be telling the reader much, and in 2000 you have probably lost them along the way.
4. Make your company ‘real’
With all that great content you are adding tell the reader about your business – who you are, why you started it, and why you are doing what you are doing.
Use real photos of yourself and the company. People want to see the real you, not ‘stock’ images. Especially if you are a business that people are handing lots of cash over to. People want to trust you. If the users trust you (return to your site and stay on the site) then in turn Google will trust you, and you will rank higher.
5. Regular updates
I always feel weird telling clients this one, as it seems slimy, like your trying to upsell. Of course a SEO company will tell you to update regularly. Why wouldn’t they? Then they are getting steady business from you. But it’s so true. Think about it. No one wants to see an outdated website from 1990 when Googling a question. We want the most relevant and up to date info. So does Google – they are just giving the people what they want. On all my websites I aim to do at least one ‘update’ (change or addition) every month. This way I’m up to date, and telling Google I still care about my site and it hasn’t been left on the shelf.
If we want to rank on the first page of Google, it’s not going to be an easy task. We have to do things like build a website with quality content and spend time building our social media presence so that it will show up when people search for us! Fortunately, there are plenty of resources out in the world which can help you achieve this goal if you put some work into them.
Sometimes getting ranked number one is just about putting in enough effort over a prolonged period of time – anything else would simply be too difficult or take way too long without giving any guarantees at all!
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