3 Tips To Improve Your Google Ranking

A question I often get asked by website owners is:

Why isn’t my site appearing on page 1 of Google for relevant search terms?

As you may or may not know, ranking on page 1 of Google for search terms (or keywords, as they’re more commonly known) related to your business is a difficult task. In fact, nobody knows for certain how to get a website to rank on page 1 of Google. Google has a closely guarded algorithm, which ranks websites based on a large number of factors. On top of this, the algorithm is constantly updated, to reflect the latest user trends.

For example, in early 2013, the official line from Google was:

In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.

Now, as of January 2014, this reads:

In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share.

So, in early 2013 (and prior to that), the most effective way to rank on page 1 of Google was to have as many high quality websites linking to your website as possible. Now, with the massive shift towards social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram etc.), Google believes that people sharing your content through these channels is more important than websites linking to your content.

That is not to say that high quality “back-links” from websites no longer matter. In fact, they certainly play some part in the current Google algorithm. But high quality content on your website is now what matters most.

So what can you do to help get your website on page 1? Here are three useful tips. Please note that this will not achieve overnight success. On average, depending on how good your website is, it could take months or years to rank on page 1 for highly competitive search terms.

Update Your Website Regularly

This takes some discipline, but on average, you should add a new Latest News or Blog article to your website on a weekly, or at most, monthly, basis. Before your write a new blog post or news item, your strategy should be as follows:

• Identify keywords that you want to rank for
• Analyse these keywords to see how competitive they are, which indicates how easy or hard it will be to rank for them. (If you need help with this, contact me)
• Choose keywords which people search for often. (Again, contact me to learn more about this – there will be future blog posts on this topic)
• For each blog post, choose one keyword, and base the article around that keyword

Promote Your New Blog Articles on Social Media

Once you’ve created your new article, it’s time to promote it. If your website is business-to-consumer based, then you should let your Facebook and Twitter followers know about your new article. Make sure to provide a link to the article.

If your website is business-to-business, you may want to promote it on LinkedIn.

To make life easier for you, you should install social media sharing buttons on your website. Similar to the ones at the bottom of this article. This makes it easier for website visitors to share interesting articles with their friends and colleagues.

Start an Email List

The easiest way to promote your new blog posts is to email your existing website visitors and clients. If you don’t have an email list, you can start one today by adding an email sign-up box to your website. Each time you create a new article, email your clients with a short summary and a link to the article. Your list members may forward the email to other prospective clients. It’s a cheap but extremely effective means of promoting your website’s latest news.

If you’d like advice on any of the points above, please contact me today.