SEO Guide - How to Improve Your Website
Ranking on Google
17 min read
17 min read
This SEO Guide will help you improve your website's ranking on Google and other search engines. So if you're wondering how to make your site get better ranking or appear first on Google, this blog is for you!
First of all it is good to know what SEO is. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is the process of optimizing a website for a wide variety of ranking factors which contributes for your website to rank higher on search engines.
The objective of SEO is to make the site being optimized receive more and relevant organic traffic from search engines like Google, which has about 91% of the entire world search market.
By optimizing your website with SEO techniques you will make your website send the correct signals to “crawlers or spiders” (which is Google's algorithm) when they find crawl your website.
That been said it is good say that your site is rated as a whole, but also each page individually.
I understand sometimes the more technical part of SEO can seem quite confusing and that SEO seems to have nothing to do with people. But what we have to understand, is that at the same time that we create the content of our website for people. We have to interact with the search engines that are the mediators between us and our target audience.
Therefore, with the application of SEO techniques on your website/blog, you will prepare your website to eb better findable and to ranked higher in search engine result pages(SERPs).
SEO can be divided into three parts:
Technical SEO - refers to the optimization of parts of your website such as website speed... and server, which aims to facilitate your website to be crawled and indexed.
Off-page SEO - refers to techniques that can be used to better positioned search engine result pages(SERPs). This part os SEO is mostly focused on practices such as Link building (getting other website to link to your website) and the use of Social Media to share content (which will be the topic of another blog).
On-page SEO - refers to practices applied to the pages of a website individually, which aims on setting up a content strategy to optimizing different aspects of a pager such as title, meta description... which will drive traffic, links and basically everything you need to make your website thrive online.
Why Should I Optimize My website For SEO?
Simple! Google wants to provide the best content to its users. Therefore, when someone creates high quality content and uses this variety of techniques. This site shows Google that it has exactly what Google's users are looking for.
With this SEO Guide I will focus more on On-page SEO practices, but I will also brush up on some technical SEO practices.
Below I will explain how to optimize each of these elements.
The title of your pages is one of the most important parts of your website. Your title can either make someone who comes across your page on Google click to read mor eon your pages or not.
The title of your page appears on Google just as the example above
And as you can see in the image the title, it is one of the three elements most prominent on SERPs and that is why it needs to be carefully thought, implemented and even tested.
Use the tips below to optimize your titles
Include your main keyword in your title, but without exaggeration .
Have a title with a minimum of 50 or a maximum of 60 characters (If not, Google won't show it in full and you may lose chances of convincing your target audience to visit your website.
Be creative and use impactful words that will arouse your readers' curiosity, but at the same time be realistic and relevant to the content of each of your pages.
Optimizing your page's description is very important. The reason why it matters is because that one and only big shot to convince people to visit your website. Therefore, spoil a bit the content of your page but leave the feeling of read more.
Other than that, Google will search for relevance among the search of its users with the keywords used in its description page, title, url etc…
So don't forget to take the following items into account in your meta descriptions
Include your main keywords.
Have a description that accurately describes the content of page, and make sure that your page descriptions are unique, (don't repeat the same page description on other pages or blogs on your site).
Use a minimum of 50 and a maximum of 160 characters. If you exceed 160 characters, your page description will not be displayed in full.
URL is the address of your website, (e.g the URL of this page is www.marketing4peers.com/blog/seo-guide).
First we have the domain that is (www.marketing4peers.com) that every website has its own and then comes what we call slug. Then the domain + slug makes it up to the URL of your page.
Anything after your domain extension such as .com" is called a slug and each page on your site must have a single slug. The slug can and should also be optimized to also send the correct signals to Google.
Use the tips bellow to optimize your slugs
Include your keywords in your slug.
Your pages urls should not exceed 115 characters.
Make sure your slug is readable, even without using stop words like: a, and, or, etc.
Chose well an carefully tour domain extension ".com, .nl, com.br, and so on". even though nowdays most countries are okay with .com/pt/, .com/fr/... others aren't.
Note
Before continuing, I want to emphasize once again the importance of optimizing your: title, page description and URL. Because getting those elements right can make all the difference for whether a person goes to your site or not.
For that, just making your site appear on Google is not enough!
These three elements are fundamental to make your site appear on Google and to motivate whoever sees them to visit your website.
So plan your titles, pages descriptions and URLs well!
Create a proper internal link strategy so that your content may serve as support to your main pages.
By creating relevant internal links to your pages you tell search engines, and your readers, that the pages you are linking to are relevant to this content they are reading.
Use the tips bellow to optimize your internal links
Use anchor texts that are relevant and witht he keywords your wish to rank your content for (e.g: I could link this page with the anchor text “On-page SEO tips or SEO Guide” on other pages to link to this article).
Don't create to many internal internal links. Use between 3 and 5 internal links per page, but also link other sites that have relevant content and with a high page authority and domain score(check on moz for more on page and domain authority).
When linking to other pages that are positioned on Google, for keywords that you wish to gain higher ranking on Google. Do not use pages from the first page on Google, because that way you might be only contribute to that pages in the same as if they linked to your page. Instead use pages from the second, third or fourth page, because they will be less competitive for your page.
Linking to other websites in content is also a common practice when creating content for your blogs. When creating articles related to a subject that has a very high saturation it is normal to use secondary sources or other blogs, articles and etc…
In this case it is always good and recommended to give credit to the creator of this content, which in this case you would do by creating a link to another site as a source.
When doing this you have two options, one is to mention another page and pass signs of authority to it or just mention that other source but not pass signs of authority to it.
Don't worry this is as complicated as it seems
If you want to pass signs of authority to another page, you don't have to do anything, except put the link of that other website's page in an anchor text (anchor text are those texts or words that are used as a link, and usually have a different color on a page or are only emphasized in bold).
Now if you don't want to pass your authority on to other sites follow the steps below.
For example: You created a new blog and you want to link to another page but you don't want to pass your authority on to that other site.
First we have to understand a little bit of HTML, but it is very simple. ( "open tag" href=”page link”> anchor text "close tag" ). This is the normal structure now, if you do not want to pass signs of authority to this other site, you should just add the following code ( rel=”nofollow” ) which will look like this --> ( "open tag" href=” page url” rel=”nofollow”> anchor text "close tag" ). That way your page will not send your authority signals to that other page. But don't use that much because search engines use those kind of linsk to read other website and that create Google spider web.
One way to use link building organically for your site's benefit can be through reciprocity. Reciprocity works well.
When I link to a website and let them know that I did that, that other website will feel honored and the following two actions can be noticed.
This other site wants to publish (on social networks, etc.) because it was mentioned as an authority on a subject on its blog
Or that site may even mention your site on their site as we were referred and recognized by your website. This would in turn create a link to your site by organically creating links to your site.
Of course, this other site could also do nothing and if you want you could use the technique mentionned above to not pass on your authority signs to them
Choosing your keywords correctly will determine whether or not your site will appear on Google.
Of course, there are a number of factors to consider when positioning a website. But if you wronglly choose your keywords you won't see the expected results
In order to find keywords to optimize your website content for, you can use the following techniques!
Open your browser on Google or Google Chrome and start typing something related to what you want to optimize your content for.
As soon as you start writing, you will see that Google will start to suggest a few sentences to complete what you are writing.
These phrases are based on searches frequently sought on Google. Now knowing that there are people searching for those keywords or phrases. You can use these keywords to gain more ideas for optimizing your content.
You can do that with the help of Google Keyword Planner tool on Google Ads to search for more ideas, or to find out approximately how many searches are done monthly for the keywords you found previouslly.
Now that you have a list of keywords, you must do something very important
Search for your competition for these keywords. And see what strategy you can use to position yourself better than them.
See example below!
Domain authority (com Moz Chrome Toolbar)
Page authority (with Moz Chrome Toolbar)
How many external links those pages have
Title
Meta description
Content size
In case you want to know, which keywords your competitors are optimizing their website for you can use a tool called SEMrush.
If you want to know more about how to search for keywords read (How to Optimize Your Site's Keywords)
There are several types of content to be used. The most used are: videos, photos, text content (Blog posts, articles), audio (podcast), infographics and any other creative type of content you want to use. Asit is well known “Content is King”, even more when it comes to SEO.
Some SEO professionals see SEO as one thing and content as another, but as you may have noticed SEO without content is not possible because content is needed for optimization to be done.
This task can become a little more difficult in the case of videos, podcasts and images, but not impossible because google also rank images and podcasts and videos one can also use the transcription for ranking.
Videos and audios can be optimized through the use of keywords in the page description, URL optimization. Something that is also worth having a transcription for your videos and audios (podcasts), so the text can also be optimized.
Search engine algorithms are unable to read audio or video, so having a transcript makes it easier for search engines to read the content of your page.
The optimization of your photos and images must be done in two ways that are very important and that is often overlooked.
Give your images a relevant and unique name
Create a unique lternative text (or alt text) for each of your images, make it as accurately and as descriptive as possible to what can be seen in the image.
include moderatelly your keywords in your images alt text "alternative text".
Alt Text in Wordpress"
Alt Text in HTML
The importance of “alternative text” is for example: if a photo on your website doesn't show for any reason, the alternative text will be used to describe your image.
Another advantage of having an alternative text is for people with visual impairments. These people will hear the content of the site including the alternative text such as: "This is an image of a beach in the reservoir."
I think the most important tip with regard to content is: produce content with at least 800 and bring some new insight or something new and relevant to the table.
Even having indicated this minimum of words, this minimum will often depend on your competitors. Because, for your content to be more relevant than that of your competitors, the amount of content also matters.
Why should you create content
People thesedays are tired of advertising. Through strategic content production you will captivate your readers' attention. Which in turn, when the time come, you will be able to convert your readers into customers or ambasadors of your brand.
One of the advantages of creating content that is long, is that this way you can target more keywords.
E.g If you have a restaurant in Amsterdam, you will want these two keywords to appear frequently in your content.
If you want to know, how often do you have to use keywords in your content?
Don't think about frequency, think about relevancy. Use as many times you need but don't over use it.
The problem with stuffing your pages with keywords will bring more harm than good. So me moderate and implement it wiselly.
Do not use techniques known as "Black Hat SEO". Which are techniques used for fast results but which will negatively affect your website as soon as it is discovered by search engines.
For example, some people have already thought that it would be a good idea to make their keywords in the same color as the background of their pages. But this is the worst thing you can do because when search engines see this "and they will", your site will be penalized if not banned from searches. So invest time and if you don't have time, find an SEO professional. But don't try the easy way because it won't payoff.
The technical SEO elements that I will discuss on this blog are: the importance of having a sitemap, and having a site that loads fast.
A sitemap is a hierarchical list of pages (with links) organized by topic, an organization chart, or an XML document, which help search engines to easily navigate your website.
The importance of your site being fast to load is that just like people are impatient to wait for a site that takes more than 3 to 5 seconds to load, so are engines search.
If your site doesn't load within 3 seconds, it is estimated that you can loose as much as 11% of visitor.
Use these tips to optimize your website loading time
Avoid using unnecessary HTML and Javascript codes and use proper css rendering.
Optimize your images size but using appropriate size and compress them as much as possible, so that they won't overload your pages.
“The most important SEO tip I can give you is: create content that is relevant and useful for humans and optimize it for search engines.”
Regardless of the SEO strategy you want to use, never forget that your website should aim to add value to your readers.
If you learned something from this article, help me by sharing it on social media. If you have any questions, please contact us at Marketing4Peers and we will be happy to help you.