We are already in mid-2018 and it must be frustrating for you if you have not gained a good position on the SERPs yet. Some of you must be thinking of running paid campaigns and some still rely on organic ranking but confused to find the proper way towards the first-page rank.
Actually, there’s no ultimate guide to get good ranks on Google. There are a lot of factors that Google counts, but you never know which one can be effective for you. Thus, you have to keep an eye on your competitors every time and run A/B tests to find out which method can be effective for you.
The write-up contains 12 effective ways to rank fast on Google.
- Find Out What Google Believes to be Useful to the Searchers
Before you publish a new page or post, perform a Google search to see what Google considers to be relevant to the keyword searches. It will give you an idea about the type of content you need to produce to rank your website for a particular search term. Investigating the results is also necessary to find out the drawbacks of the available contents, enabling you to mention in your landing page the points that have not been answered before.
- Write Long-Form Content
It’s a fact that Google loves long-form content. There are several reasons behind it. A lot of content on a web page means a lot of information. So, there are obvious reasons that users will spend more time on the landing page, reducing the website’s bounce rate which is a major ranking signal. Moreover, if users who like ultimate guides feel that the information is really beneficial, might share it on social media, bringing in more organic traffic. Long form contents can also get referred and generate backlinks easily which establishes the authority of the particular page, resulting in a ranking boost.
- Link to Authoritative Sites
Linking to high-authority sites is one of the most effective ways to improve the credibility of your website. For instance, if you include data or stats to your content, back them up with some authoritative resources. You can also mention a brand name and hyperlink it to the related page of the website. Make sure, that all your links are not only from the reputed sources but also recent.
- Remove Broken Links
If you are including links from reputed websites, the risk of getting broken links is low. However, there may be instances where some of your internal links exist no longer and are unable to deliver any information to the users. It will not only affect your user experience but also crush your SEO ranking. Using a tool like Dead Link Checker you can find out the links with errors on your site and make your site both SEO and user-friendly.
- Improve Readability
Keep your audience in mind when you are writing a piece pf content. If you want potential users to visit your site, spend more time and benefit from the information you are providing, you need to communicate with them in a way they can understand. Ensure you also design your website using attractive fonts and header tags, proper spacing and attractive images or infographics. If you are using WordPress, you can check the readability of a particular page or post by installing a plugin, namely Yoast SEO. You can also get help of an online resource like Readable.
- Use Keywords in Titles and Descriptions
Google bots have grown smarter today, minimizing the effectiveness of keyword rich contents. But, the tactfully use of keywords in titles, meta descriptions and tags are still important. Yes, Google bots crawl titles and meta descriptions frequently. Apart from, using high, medium and low search volume keywords, you can also include LSI keywords in the body content. It would improve the visibility of your web page when a search related to your content is performed. To generate LSI keywords, you can use a tool like LSI Graph.
- Use Less Popular Variations of Keywords
If most of your competitors are targeting a high search volume keyword like SEO Toronto, you can use a less popular keyword like Search Engine Optimization Toronto that might not have much competition. This alternate version may get 5% of the search volume of the former keyword but you can still get more traffic by ranking #1 with it than ranking #30 with the popular version.
- Make Your URLs SEO – Friendly
To let search engines index all your pages, you need to create URLs that are SEO-friendly. There are generally two types of URLs, static and dynamic. While the first one remains same all the time, dynamic URLs change themselves depending on the content of the page. These auto-generated URLs are generally used in eCommerce sites as a lot of products get uploaded and sold out every day there. Dynamic URLs contain letters and symbols in them, making it incomprehensible to both the search engines and searchers. While, static URLs are manually created URLs, containing texts, making your web page SEO-friendly.
- Get Assistance of Google Search Console
Making your website Google friendly is one of the most effective ways to rank quickly. Integrate Google Search Console to manage the search engine presence of your website effectively. With it, you can learn about the technical errors on your website. Apart from this, it helps Google find your website easily. It often happens that some of the website URLs don’t get crawled. Google Search Console allows you to request a force index of your URLs.
- Bring in More Traffic
Generating traffic is another effective ranking factor. If there’s a good number of traffic to a particular page of your website, Google will consider that the page contains some valuable information for the users and will eventually give it a top position.
There are several ways to bring traffic to your website. You can share your stories and updates on social media, write guest posts, press releases, classifieds, submit business listings, answer questions on forums etc. But to get fast results, you need to know where most of your users are coming from and post regularly on those platforms. Use Google Analytics to learn about the sources and mediums that generate maximum number of traffic for you.
- Optimize Images
The image files on your website should be optimized with keywords. Besides, the alt image texts of the images should have keywords in it. It will optimize your article and improve its presence on the SERPs. Moreover, a properly optimized image will also boost your ranking in the image search. Make sure that the file size of the image is not above 100 kb, otherwise, your landing page will take much time to load that can affect your SEO ranking.
- Use HTML5
SEO ranking also depends on the coding of your website. Code clutter makes it difficult for the search engines to learn what the web page is all about. Thus, using the latest version of markup language, HTML5 can prove to beneficial. The new semantic elements in HTML5 explains what’s included in a particular section of a web page, making it easier for the search engines to learn precisely about a web page. In addition, it improves the load time that is also necessary for SEO ranking.
That’s it. In this post, we have discussed some of the major SEO ranking factors to get a site ranked. It’s not that you will start getting results as soon as you implement all these above-mentioned methods. You should have your own strategy to which you can add a few of these tactics and witness the outcome.
Try these methods and share your valuable feedback.