Improving your search ranking is a constant battle, but the payoff is often worth the work. That’s because a good search ranking directly leads to more website visitors. And from there, you can cookie visitors to push them relevant content. You can engage them with lead generating tactics. Just to name a few. So let’s look at five things you can do right now to improve your search rankings.
1. Publish Relevant Content Regularly
The single best way to improve your search ranking is to have relevant content that visitors appreciate. Use SEO to help explain ideas but don’t make it so SEO heavy that the content loses all readability. Instead, look to #3 below for keyword loading your page and focus instead on quality content.
In addition to quality content, is timely content. Post regularly or the benefits of your quality content will be short-lived. That because old content indicates to search engines that your site is no longer relevant. Consider republishing old content with slightly updated versions so you’re not constantly creating content from scratch.
2. Metadata & ALT Tags
Whether you know it or not, your webpages already have metadata that identifies the content on each page. This data (words), help search engines determine what sites to display for a given search and in what order. Happily, you can change the meta data you already have. Simply search the Help feature on your web hosting site for the right tutorial.
In addition to adding metadata to your webpages, you want to add ALT tags to each image and video on your website. These are descriptions of the image or video so you can increase your chances of your website being found.
3. Add FAQs
FAQs are not only great content for visitors to learn more about your product or service (see #1), but it’s also a terrific opportunity to load up on SEO keywords. Add new FAQs to keep the content fresh and be sure your FAQ are crawlable, and not, say, in a PDF or a JPEG. Not sure where to get FAQs? Ask your salespeople, ask your website visitors, or look at inbound marketing leads. Chances are, you’ll find plenty to keep your FAQs relevant and fresh.
4. Publish a Sitemap
You see sitemaps all the time on websites but when was the last time you used it? That’s because these maps are more for search spiders than visitors. Sitemaps list your website webpages and provide links to each major page so it’s easier for search engines, and users, to find the content they’re looking for quicker.
5. Mobile-Friendly
With more and more searches being done on mobile devices, and with search engines like Google prioritizing mobile-friendly sites, it’s critical that you make your webpages welcoming to mobile. This blog post will help you get started.
Improving search is so important for a small business so register for this free webinar, on demand now, to get a deep dive into getting on the first page of Google search.
Image: Photospin