It’s practically a truism these days that you must build a website for your business. Without one, your business goes unnoticed by all those Internet natives who assume that everything is on the Web. Except, it goes even deeper than that.
It’s not enough that you build a website. You must build a website that ranks on Google. If you really want online success, you need a site that delivers a page one Google ranking.
Not sure how you can achieve that goal? Keep reading for five ways you can increase your Google search ranking and land on page one.
1. Deliver Excellent Content
Good content sits at the heart of almost all successful websites. Of course, good often proves subjective, so let’s dig a little deeper.
Good content from the Google perspective means content that relates closely to your website’s main topic. The content offers good contextual relevance and links to high authority sources. It also avoids obvious sins like keyword stuffing.
2. Boost Your User Experience
Not every website delivers a great user experience. For example, some sites still employ confusing menus. In other cases, a site uses an inappropriate theme, such as a photo carousel theme on a site where text content is the primary draw.
Ask people to visit the site and note things that bothered or distracted them. Work on eliminating those things from the site.
3. Mobile Friendly
Google puts a lot of emphasis on the over level of mobile-friendly your site possesses. A site that proves very mobile-friendly will generally get a higher rank than a similar site with a poor level of mobile-friendliness. Chalk it up to the very wide use of smartphones and tablets.
If your site doesn’t perform well on mobile, you should either update it yourself or call in a website design pro for help updating the site.
4. Optimize Images
Big images can slow your page load times down to a comparative crawl. You should go through your site and replace large image files with smaller jpeg versions. You can link those smaller images to high-res images that load separately when someone clicks on them.
5. Work on the Links on Your Site
You can take two big steps in improving the links on your site. You can start by excising any broken links you find. Google hates them.
Second, you build solid internal linking between your pages and between related content. Google rewards that kind of internal linking.
Long-Term Google Rank Improvement
The tactics covered above will likely help improve your Google rank unless you spent a lot of time working on your SEO already. These tactics merely touch on the tip of the SEO iceberg.
Long-term improvement in your site’s ranking will require that you maintain these practices and build on them. Some other tactics might include overall site speed improvements and better backlinking.
Looking for more tips on building a better website or ranking well? Check out the content in our tech section for more helpful info.