Google Ranking Essentials
There are only three core ingredients that affect Google rankings.
Getting to the top of Google is important to grow your business with a constant stream of new customers, but for many businesses, it just doesn’t happen.
You’ve probably got as far as reading Google’s SEO getting started guide…. followed it’s advice, put in lots of time writing some great content and then rapidly became despondent when you didn’t leap to the top of the search results.
The problem is that if you follow their guidance to the letter then you will never rank…… it just won’t happen.
While it’s generally speaking quite accurate, you do need to provide good quality web content, well laid out and presented on a site that loads and works efficiently, but you also need to make it popular and that is the bit that Google don’t want to help you with.
Google aren’t big fans of you creating links to promote your website, but backlinks provide to power that will propel your website up the rankings or alternatively, if you build them badly, that can destroy your rankings and traffic completely.
Need to know the difference between good and bad links? Read this article from DeehoSEO to give yourself the best links you can.
Tip No. 1
Quality Content Rules
If you just want to bash out a few words and get them published then Google probably isn’t the place for you to prosper.
If however you want to publish some great pages, articles, posts and white papers that give really useful information and that are used proactively by your visitors then Google results are the place for you.
Quality, Quality, Quality… in everything you include on your website.
Tip No. 2
Choose Your Web Host Wisely
If you chose your hosting based on which was cheapest then shame on you……. that is not the way to buy a car is it….. please can you sell me the one with the oldest, smallest, least powerful engine, and an oil leak?
Why do it with the engine that will drive your website? You are about to spend thousands of pounds building, developing and marketing a website that has the potential to earn you many times your investment…. but you’re prepared to use the slowest, noisiest, weakest, most unreliable motor to drive it…….
If instead you look for the best value, high quality hosting then your website will load faster, with high availability, near zero downtime and better all round performance.
Slow sites don’t have good Google rankings & your visitors will soon get bored of waiting for your site.
Tip No. 3
Link Building
If you already have links, check the ratios of the link text used in them…. if you have too many, you won’t rank.
If you don’t have any links pointing to a specific page you want to rank then do this;
- Build 1 Google friendly link, use exact match anchor text for your prime keyword for that page and point the link to the page.
- Wait and see how the page ranks.
- Adjust the page content on-page text density / content quality if required.
- If a rankings boost is required then build a couple of Brand links and a couple of URL links and point them to the same page.
- Review once the links have propagated fully.
- If you need to improve rankings further and you are sure that your on-page SEO is well optimized then you will need additional links; two more Brand, two more URL, one more longtail phrase match.
In many cases this will be enough to deliver top rankings for many pages if their on-page content is well constructed.